Christmas and Cats...

Published on November 11, 2025 at 3:46 PM

Christmas time is one of my favorite times of the year, and I love decorating the entire house, inside and out! This usually means a project or two… and we all know how that goes around here!

Tree day is where it begins! Taking down all the pumpkins and autumn décor, cleaning, like spring cleaning only dusting all the areas that Christmas stuff will sit on or get tacked to! I always find it interesting… Doug makes himself scarce in these moments when I begin deep cleaning…. He typically finds a project or something that needs doing outside. Today, he’s moving wood… from the woodshed up to the boiler, so that the side of the woodshed that needs to be fixed can be empty. A task that requires a lot of loads of wood moved…

Meanwhile, I clean. Take down and put away all the harvest décor and set up the Christmas tree. This year we have two little kitties and that means we have to be aware all the time that they want to be in this tree! So it’s set up, not decorated yet… that will come tomorrow. But hopefully the time will allow the cats to realize they aren’t to be in it… Though, it’s never worked before. Even Rufus still wants to be in the tree and he’s 9. Haha!!

This will be a challenge… Chester, is the instigator… He starts getting into mischief and Emil follows…. So why does this fall into the category of #howtomakeyourhubbycrazy?? Let me explain.

Several months ago, in June, we found mice in our barn… in the coop actually. The only way to really get rid of them, is cats… Well, Rufus, though a good hunter/mouser, he’s old… and has gotten lazy. Oh don’t get me wrong, he’ll catch and kill a bird, bat or mouse… but he’s not going to go down to the barn to do it… he like easy meals. The barn is about 200 ft away from the house… that would require a lot of walking…

So, I decided we needed some barn cats. I posted on facebook and a lady had messaged me that she had some. Great! She dropped them off on Canada Day… and they were little…. Like really little, maybe 5 weeks old… We bottle fed them! Too little to go to the barn. Well, like any normal person, I brought them inside, and they were so cute and cuddly, of course we had to domesticate them a bit! Doug was not impressed…. But Chester (the orange and white one) decided Doug was “his person.” He would cuddle up on him, sleep on the back of his chair…. And it’s interesting, because Doug was always saying he didn’t like these cats, and they need to go to the barn… but it appears to us that he doesn’t really mean that!

Well, recently, we’ve now discovered that we also have rats… cats don’t get rid of rats… anyway, we’re in the process of getting rid of them, and the cats… well, they are in the house…. And even though Doug complains, secretly he loves the cats!!

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