Lucy Fur

This is a story about our first Christmas with Lucy a year ago December.

She was only a few months old and so full of energy. It was the first Christmas in our new house and we wanted to have everything perfect. My first move was not decorating the bottom 2 feet of our 9 foot artificial Christmas tree so there would be nothing for her to easily reach. To further thwart our little girl, I set up motion detector toys (a frog and a Dalmatian) to make noises at her as she crossed their path.

Well, she didn't seem to care about the ornaments, but she really loved the packages. She really loved OPENING the packages. One day I came home from work, and she ran to the tree to proudly show me that she'd discovered that if she went around the frog it wouldn't yell at her. Wasn't I proud of my baby? She then jumped on the frog's back and bit its head. Later on I discovered her sleeping under the tree, all nestled up in scraps of wrapping paper she took off of packages and made into a nest.

So I brought out the Halloween gargoyle. This thing is creepy. It yells and flaps it's bat wings and it's eyes flash red. It is also motion activated. I set it up by the tree an went to make dinner. I heard it yell and looked around the corner just in time to see a black streak running for our bedroom. Finally convinced her to stay away.

That Christmas we all had presents with claw and teeth marks on them. I often had to explain to guests why we had a Halloween decoration under our tree. We all came down with the flu just a couple of days before Christmas, and Lucy probably had the most fun on Christmas day than anybody else.

Copyright © Hazel Az
April 17, 1999