Cat Tails: Thinking about a Christmas list

Clem wasn’t exactly sure what Christmas was, but there seemed to be a lot of talk about it. She saw commercials on television that encouraged humans to buy lots of things for their loved ones, so she knew it had something to do with presents. Clem knew about presents. She’d come to live with the yarn lady the day before her birthday and had greatly enjoyed the boxes the yarn lady’s presents had come in. She especially liked the ones that had tissue paper in them, as it made the most delightful noises when she crinkled it.

The boxes had contained pretty or useful things that people had given to the yarn lady. She figured the stuff inside was the presents, and not the boxes, even though she personally had preferred the boxes. She had just been a very little kitten then. Now she was mostly grown up, and wanted presents as well as boxes. Every once in a while Clem herself had received presents. Someone the yarn lady corresponded with had sent her two marvelous mousies, and Peep’s mommy had brought her presents also. One was a pink stuffed squid that clucked like a chicken when it was kicked or thrown. Confusing but fun.

The yarn lady had told her daughter to make sure she made a Christmas list. Clem figured out that this was where you wrote down all the things you might like to get as presents. She thought it was a good idea, since if you were going to get presents they should be things you liked. On the other hand, some of the gifts the yarn lady liked best from her birthday had just been things that her friends and family thought she would like. The daughter (whom Tatum and Ursula called the noisy girl, even though she wasn’t all that noisy) had given her a cool little wooden bowl that the yarn lady used every day and smiled every time she looked at it. So, maybe unexpected presents might be really good too.

Anyhow, from what Clem could tell, whatever Christmas was, its main purpose was presents. So, she’d been working on her own list for a while now. She knew a bunch of things she’d like to have, but was trying to figure out how to communicate that to the yarn lady. First she’d thought of writing as if she were one of the yarn lady’s friends in an email, but then figured out she wouldn’t be able to get into their email accounts to send the message, so that wouldn’t work. And of course she couldn’t send it from her own email account, as the last thing Clem wanted was for the yarn lady to know that she could read, write and operate a computer. That was against the Universal Cat Code of Secrecy, or UCCS for short.

She was considering a number of other options, including a new email account that would be from, say, a cat toy reviewing group. She thought that was probably the best idea. Another one was a blog about cat toys, but she didn’t know how she’d get the yarn lady to look at that blog. A third idea was a Facebook account from someone who could ask to be the yarn lady’s friend and then talk about cat toys all the time. The problem with that one was that maybe the yarn lady wouldn’t want to be that person’s friend. Who knows, maybe she’d do all three.