It’s getting close to Christmas and I thought this would be a fun topic of discussion. What do you do to protect your precious Christmas tree against the ravages of pets?
I just got free-roaming animals in the house in for the first time in almost ten years. A pair of mismatched cats, from the animal rescue. In October I didn’t have much to worry about – Cats really can’t make fake tombstones look worse – only a little more realistic. Come Christmas I would have the dreaded problem oft-discussed in chat rooms: What to do about cats and Christmas trees?
I disregarded all of the chatroom advice. It was wrongheaded, so to speak. “Ban this, fence that, etc…” Sounded like a bunch of politicians. I needed a Libertarian approach. A… Stoic approach. I decided that cats were going to get into the tree no matter what I did, so I might was well harden the tree so they could have a good time and I would not worry about their instinctual actions. I thought back to what I learned from Ron73440’s excellent series:
“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals, not under my control, and which have to do with the choice I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own.” — Epictetus
With that in mind, I used this to mitigate potential issues with the cats:
- Fake folding tree: It’s old, and all the branches fold out like some kind of coniferous umbrella. Since all the branches are attached via hinges it is unlikely to come apart. I think all the fake trees come like that now.
- 1 cheap tree turner: The cats don’t much care for jumping on a turning tree, no matter how slowly. The success of this surprised me. This same one is $30 at Big Lots. The wide footing also helps with the tree tilting under the weight of multiple animals.
- LED lights: Low voltage in case they did gnaw through. Most lights are LED now, which is good overall for preventing pet electrocution. These do tricks which is also pretty neat.
- Garden Twist Ties: I used a big coil of green garden twist ties to attach the ornaments. No string, no little hook wires. This worked great. Not a much higher rate of drops than when I didn’t have cats. I recommend this highly.
- Use plastic or metal ornaments: This may go without saying for many of you, but don’t put your Aunt Petunia’s glass snow globe from the 1900s on the tree. Display that elsewhere.
Voila! A stoic Christmas. The cats are treated as per their disposition instead of being treated as if they are evil for climbing. I see them running around in the tree and I just know it is in their nature and I don’t worry about it.
Howe do you handle your pets during the holidays?
Build That Wall!
Howe do you handle your pets during the holidays?
Kiki shows zero interest in the tree (also artificial) so I haven’t had to do anything special.
You solutions are excellent, however! I have never seen a tree-turner. Pretty cool!
Saturate the zone – put up so many trees that the cats can’t climb them all.
Good idea!
I was gonna suggest one of those 60s aluminum abominations.
The kitties will be laughing so hard they couldn’t possibly climb.
I had one! Last cats all but raped it STEVE SMITH style. Also the branches fit into little holes – so the cats would occasionally walk by with a whole branch. They just popped out. Thise trees make an irresistible crinkling noise.
Okay, look, Boss, you need to take that back about aluminum tree abominations. Those are the ultimate of midcentury modern cool.
Those are the ultimate of midcentury modern
coolmisadventure.I am saddened.
One of the childhood holiday traditions was unpacking and assembling the tree. All the little wire branches needed to be bent outward and the branches fit into the proper layer of the trunk. It was more fun than putting the silly lights and stupid onraments on.
We had one of those growing up, a really big one. It was color coded, with paint at the thick end of each branch. But over the years the colors wore off so we were all frustrated for 10 minutes trying to figure out what color each branch was supposed to be.
At one point ours was color coded, but as the years went on we just sorted by size of the branches.
Same for me. I built the tree, let my sister and parents decorate the tree.
My brother diligently repainted the color coding and later used electrical wire markers to keep the branches organized on our old family tree. It was just like yours, this woodgrain look metal with branch hanger holes, and aluminum branches that pegged in place. That did always take forever to assemble. I recall it being huge. I think maybe that is just my memory of being small and staring up at it. Yes, the new ones take about ten minutes to set up, the expand like an umbrella. This one I have now had for over 16 years. When the original lights died (literally year three) I snipped them all off.
Cats really can’t make fake tombstones look worse – only a little more realistic.
Works for real tombstones too.
I was about 8. The first year the we had our cat. I was by the tree when he tried to climb it. I lunged to grab him before he got too high. He was climbing too quickly and I missed his body but grabbed his tail instead. I pulled him down off the tree by his tail. That was the first and last time he ever tried to climb the tree. My parents just thought he was a good cat.
When I was a kid our dad used to run a pair of wires from either side of the tree to the walls in the corner where the tree went. This was after multiple take-downs by climbing cats.
My dogs are completely uninterested in our fake tree. I guess if we had a real tree they might be tempted to pee on it.
On of our pit bulls (predictably) likes to lick/chew on the branches from time to time. Kind of gum them, really. Fortunately, nobody has ever played tuggy-toy with the tree.
GREAT article. I am both informed and entertained, as always in our little corner of the Internet.
This is the first year in a few decades that we don’t have a live tree. We usually had a live tree upstairs and a fake one downstairs. But this year we have a cousin and her son moving in downstairs so we just move the fake one upstairs. Our live trees were getting smaller over the years. We always had high ceilings so we’d sometimes get 9 or 10 foot trees. There was a tree farm where we’d always go, and they would charge the same price for any tree over 6 feet. Unfortunately the owner was getting older and his dumb kids didn’t want to take over. Last year’s live tree was 6 feet.
This is also the first year without any cats around. Our trick was to attach the tree to the house. At our old house, we had an exposed beam, and in that beam there was a hook where we’d hang plants. At Christmas the plant would come down, and we’d use thin wire to attach the tree to that hook. At our new house, the tree is against the stairs so we’d take twine and tie the trunk to the bannister, wrapping a sock around the bannister to protect it. Never had a tree fall over using those methods.
Thanks for the callout.
I never worried about the cats in the tree. Luckily, we have never had a wire chewer.
We would put the “nice” ornaments high, and a few cheap bulbs being broken never bothered us.
I always told my wife that that was how Choco (our late black cat, and perennial ornament breaker) celebrated Christmas.
Same here.
Easy – no pets.
For me it’s no tree, but I go to visit others when I want to look at one. The cats don’t care.
Yikes!
Too extreme for me.
Mind you I have nothing against pets. I would really love to have another good gun dog one day. But my business is such that I may be asked to drop what I’m doing and travel at short notice, which is problematic in the two or so years of intense training required to produce a capable gun dog – and also, since we moved north, Mrs. Animal’s disabilities preclude her keeping the place going in winter for more than a few days; hauling firewood and so on.
When I retire, maybe. Until then, it’s just not practical. So, no pets for now.
I understand.
Still, I’m way too needy. Gotta have my pup!
How to harden against drunk friends who lose balance and attempt, and fail, at using the tree to steady one’s self?
In that case, you need to put together a cage of rebar covered with blades and concertina wire.
Cats in Christmas trees. BTDT.
Cats are the most libertarian of animals, and libertarians are the most cat of philosophies. Just try herding us!
I cannot herd libertarians, but I can accommodate them.
“We have plenty of space in the Gulags to accommodate wrongthinkers like you”
STEVE SMITH ACCOMODATE FUNNY GLIBERTARIAN HOOMANS!
Cats are asshole murder machines that deliberately destroy other people’s stuff provided they don’t appropriate it first.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
All the critters live outside and take care of themselves, though I supplement their groceries. Deer, wild turkeys, squirrels, birds including lots of blue jays, chickadees, nuthatches and a couple wood peckers.
No xmas trees other that what god has provided. The snow is not artificial but needs cleaning up. Snowing today, as intended. This morning the turkeys were very docile, easy to see how they were domesticated.
^ This. We maintain our bird feeders year round. We have two sorts of chickadees, black-capped and boreal, as well as nuthatches, downy and hairy woodpeckers, redpolls in winter and juncos in summer. They punctuate our day with color and sound, and we really enjoy having them around.
I take the bird feeders down in early April, hide the leftovers in the garage. Bears and raccoons are too destructive. Put things back up in November after deer season.
Fortunately raccoons aren’t a problem hereabouts. Bears are liable to end up in the freezer and so far they seem to understand that.
One of my deer hunting buddies REALLY dislikes red squirrels. He keeps a loaded .410 shotgun by the front door of the hunting cabin in case he sees one.
Even coated in tons of cajun breading and fried in bacon fat, red squirrel is…not good.
Can’t put out feeders but that the squirrels will eat it all first and as we all know, one cannot stop a determined squirrel. I have to admit that since moving to the new house I can’t see the cardinal pair that visited my office window. However, we did have a woodpecker for a while. We had one eating the old house, but he went away after we put up cement fiberglass siding. I hope the fucker broke his beak. The cardinals would not tolerate the blue jays in their territory. They got downright nasty about it too.
And then there were the birds and squirrels squabbling at each other like a bunch of children on a playground.
Squirrels are pretty easy to counter; a combination of baffles, squirrel-proof feeders and feed they don’t care for (hot-pepper-laced suet, for example) does the trick. We only have little red squirrels hereabouts and other than cleaning up what seed gets spilled on the ground they don’t get too much out of the feeders.
Hot pepper seed blends and suet scare off our aquirrela and raccoons, but the birds can’t taste the capsaicin, so they eat it right up.
Relevant: https://www.boredpanda.com/protecting-christmas-tree-from-dogs-cats-pets/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic
#6 is really fucking cool!
Vacuum cleaner is good. Didn’t think of that. My goal was primarily to accede the territory instead of a campaign of terror. I do like #6.
LOL the cats couldn’t care less, but the dogs all look so guilty.
I was going to say Bah Humbug!, but I put roof lights up back in November when it was still warm. I guess I’m not the grinch I thought I was.
I dislike Christmas trees. I’d rather buy a small potted fir, then plant it in the spring.
One of our cats simply ignores the tree. Now, The Bosslady, like many other girls raised in the suburbs, took ballet for years and years, and subsequently has a dozen or so ornaments related to The Nutcracker. So she puts a Rat King down low on the tree, and our other cat is content to sit under the tree like a furry obsidian loaf and just watch the dangling rodent for hours on end.
(Note: being Florida Man, we couldn’t just have an ordinary model train beneath our tree. Had to give it some local flavor.)
That’s a nice train.
Monorail.
Update on Fish’s friend’s restaurant. People are trying to get it to Gov. Youngkin’s attention, we’ll see if he gives a crap.
The top of the paywalled linked article says the cops stole $10k worth of liquor. I hope the assholes choke on it.
Good meme in the comments
That is excellent.
This post will help you avoid a catastrophe.
Use plastic or metal ornaments
Most of my ornaments are shatterproof (you can literally bounce them on the wood floor). But I have some breakable ones too. So far so good.
As you can see *points at avatar* my petite female feline likes to play in the tree.
My two are in the article. The light brown cat was about 6 feet up when I took that picture. Next year I may secure the tree by wire and swivel to the ceiling. It leans pretty severely every couple of days,
My friend has a 25 lb cat that likes to climb into and jump from Christmas trees. They keep it anchored pretty tightly to the walls.
Our literally insane calico seems to have zero interest in the Christmas tree or decorations. I think she figures it would detract from valuable food stealing time.
I don’t like to brag, but I’m in the top 6% of learners on Duolingo.
I’m not sure what that has to do with wood hardening.
… of Klingon.
*checks*
Top 2%
93% accuracy on 1,455 lesson
*polishes nails on shirt*
Pig Latin?
French
Esperanto.
(Likely French from the reply to me this morning.)
When I first looked at Duolingo with Japanese it was awful. Many, many errors. It turned me off on the product, but I’ve been told it has gotten much better. I would think with Romance languages it likely does quite well.
Spanish is bueno.
I’m sure there are other ways, but I’ve found it perfect for my needs.
Ithkuil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_n3loSfejg
I stopped Duolingo after the forced upgrade. Too bad, I liked it a lot.
“LED lights:”
Oh noes, not LED lights! You can pry my fluorescents from my cold dead luddite fingers! New technology is de debil!
Tritium lights or no lights.
70’s oversized incandescent lights glowing with the heat of a small sun, or nothing.
Yuck – sitting through Community Reinvestment Act training, I hate everything about it.
Wait until you sit through the Cybersecurity training and find out that the most dangerous thing is disinformation by science denying white supremacist ultra MAGA domestic terrorists.
Those guys have racked up a lot of confirmed kills lately. There was… ur… some spaz the FBI cajoled into thinking about kidnapping a Governor… too many others to count.
They’re everywhere! Be on alert, they can be hiding in your own family! Best to just turn them all in now to be safe!
On hold with DMV, God help me.
Still on hold?
Looks like they’re going to ratchet up the domestic terrorism pressure.
False flag or not? You decide.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/north-carolina-power-outage-moore-county-state-of-emergency-alejandro-mayorkas-roy-cooper-duke-energy/
I blame the Russians.
Sean gets it.
Heard talk that it was done to get a tranny story hour cancelled, but if so they sure overdid it.
Back in the 90’s I worked for Nevada Power Company. We had some similar issues in remote areas where people would use our equipment for target practice. Never came up as terrorism, just morons.
Possible.
But when they find out whoever did it was a huge leftwing and green supporter it will quickly turn to talk of gun control.
I will place a bet now that it was greenies other marxists.
Dearly Departed Black Kitteh (George) was a “bush dweller,” so not a climber. He LOVED getting under the tree: https://imgur.com/gallery/NAB63i0
Awwwww *melts*
…as does Current Little Black Kitteh: https://imgur.com/f3jXrjv
Thus, the obvious answer is to have a black cat. (Big Sweet-But-Dumb Kitteh is more of a loose cannon, so no trees since his arrival.)
Sinister looking.
How can you tell that he’s left pawed?
Two of our last 4 cats have been black cats. They’re so sweet.
Awww. RIP, George.
Kill whitey. ///WhiteDevil
Rutgers professor says that “white people are committed to being villains” and falsely claims that Africans arrived in North America before white Europeans.
“Whiteness is going to have an end date,” she warns. “We gotta take these muthafuckers out.”
Ok, let’s.
If white people were really villains, these idiots wouldn’t be advertising their dissent.
We’re like the bumbling kind of villains you see on teevee. Not very effective.
*begins monologue*
But managed to take over and oppress the entire world.
And then demand the sum of one million dollars!
“Only thing she’s gonna take out is the entire buffet at Golden Corral”
😀
Remarkable similarities to Nation of Islam historical theory… at Rutgers.
Bring it, fatass.
Before I even clicked I knew it had to be Brittney Cooper, the Shame of Rutgers.
What an embarrassment.
https://imgur.com/gallery/F1f4DAg
Lulz.
Saw that coming the instant the video started.
Yes, kind of a no brainer…
Priceless.
The look on his face was awesome. I wonder if it was his vehicle or someone else’s.
I wonder whose purse he’s carrying.
stupiphany: the sudden manifestation or perception of the essential stupidity of one’s acts. Usually accompanied by physical pain, but occasionally by monetary pain or both.
Broke the door handle linkage, too.
I did not catch that. How does that happen?
Shock wave traveling down the glass inside the door. Somehow transmitted enough energy to the door handle to pop it off.
Someone’s expectations were shattered.
He can get the door open at the very least now.
We used to do that and did it without any problems.
The trick is the water can’t be too hot.
Same here. Warm water out of the tap? No problems. Of course, I was just using it on the windshield, not the side windows, which are thinner and presumably more fragile.
Bingo!
The trick big car manufacturers don’t want you to know!
Well, Oregon is fukd.
https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2022/12/judge-puts-permit-to-purchase-gun-regulation-on-hold-for-30-days-allows-rest-of-measure-114-to-take-effecct.html
The shit part is, with 40K background checks in the que, trying to get a non-banned single shot target rifle that is quite uncommon shipped in is going to be tough. The permit program is already a joke of the DL variety- how to unload, what basic laws there are, among othersuch simplism that will do nothing to stop anything, and the Cunte of a judge goes directly against SCOTUS and it’s mag ban ruling in Bruin.
Son of a Bitch.
Yeah, but psilocybin is, like, legal, man.
Trump appointee. He whiffed on that one.
I mean FFS, she went to Berkeley Law.
“The burden imposed by Measure 114 on the core Second Amendment right of self-defense is minimal,” the judge found.
“In light of the evidence of the rise in mass-shooting incidents and the connection between mass-shooting incidents and large-capacity magazines — and absent evidence to the contrary regarding the role of large-capacity magazines for self-defense — Defendants are comparably justified in regulating large-capacity magazines to protect the public,” Immergut wrote.
Left out of consideration is the expressed and explicit limit on the government stated by 2A.
Also missing – any consideration of the standards set forth in the SCOTUS decision.
Most fundamentally, she appears to be applying “rational basis” review, and I believe the Supes said “intermediate scrutiny”.
No, Intermediate was ruled too permissive. So she’s way off.
“You ask who are the militia? They are the body of the people, anyone capable of bearing arms.” – George Mason, author of the Second Amendment.
This story is stupid enough to be true.
NATO helped train a bunch of Ukrainians who are getting slaughtered right now in Bakhmut. The training they gave them to confront a massive conventional army – Counter-Insurgency (COIN),
https://awfulavalanche.wordpress.com/2022/12/06/ukraine-war-day-286-dont-take-nato-training-for-good-coin/
I chuckled.
What is the correct training for the “Zapp Brannigan” scenario?
Seems legit.
The Board of Elections of Cobb County, Georgia reaches tentative agreement with @ACLU
and @splcenter to extend the absentee ballot receipt deadline to Dec. 9 for some voters after the county failed to mail out 3,400+ absentee ballots on time.
If the agreement is approved by the court, Cobb County will accept absentee ballots from affected votes until Dec. 9 — the same return deadline for military and overseas absentee ballots — as long as the returned ballots are postmarked by Election Day.
So, if the ballots weren’t mailed on time, when were they mailed? Early enough for the return to be postmarked by election day?
👍🏻 The correct approach.
I gave up trying to prevent mine from tearing the house apart after a few months – good news is they grow out of it eventually.
https://www.rt.com/news/567777-indonesia-bans-premarital-sex/
Whoah.
Indonesia is not for lovers? Not sure that’s a great tourism slogan. Are they trying to make the COVID tourism crash permanent?
They’re the most populous islamic country in the world. I’m only surprised that it wasn’t already criminalized.
Me as well. I would have thought even hand-holding would already be a crime.
I thought they were supposed to be the more chilled out version of Islam?
It’s six months in prison instead of death by stoning.
I wonder how it will be enforced in a place like Bali.
With spring loaded batons and a lot of yelling from guys in police hats.
Dunno, but I imagine there will be plenty of western tourists dumb enough to try and find out.
Sodomy is illegal in Singapore. I didn’t feel that I was too dumb practicing it with my partner in a hotel room.
And if it was six months in jail for just being in the same room as your partner, something much easier to catch and prove? Would testing that be dumb?
Maybe it’s not an issue, because I noticed this in the article:
Last sentence is mine, guess I fudged the blockquote end tag.
I wonder the same thing.
Sounds like someone learned about demographics and replacement levels.
Enforcement seems like it might be a challenge, though.
“insults against the president or state institutions, holding unauthorized protests and spreading views counter to the ideology”
I bet our very own current admin would like to adopt at least that part of it.
1/6 political prisoners probably think it’s already happened.
Part? The part that starts with the beginning and ends with the end?
The banana republic monkeys we have running things here are banana republic monkeys.
As long as we can keep our sportzballz players out of there, everyone should be safe.
A colleague of mine was working in Indonesia. He did something to offend someone and after searching the house he was renting the cops found a Playboy magazine in it. He swears it was planted, but never the less they were going to prosecute him. At that time the penalty for having pornography was death.
He snuck out in the middle of the night, went down to the docks and stole a canoe. He paddled back to Australia (where he was from).
Needless to say he never returned to Indonesia.
*Q recoils in fear
“He paddled back to Australia”
Nothing says scared quite like that.
How far is it from Indonesia to Australia? Gotta be hundreds of miles.
That region has been crossed in simple craft since time immemorial. And if it’s paddle a few hundred miles or be executed, paddling gets easier.
And the sharks don’t are if you gotta copy of Playboy, so there is that.
care, damnit
Shortest distance from any point in Indonesia (that made any sense) to Darwin was between 500 to 600 kms on Google Maps. Just back-of-envelope.
Hopefully he had water, some food and perhaps something to shield him from the sun during that journey. Although apparently he made it regardless, so…
I bet that dude never had to buy his own beer ever again.
“Howe do you handle your pets during the holidays?”
Is this going to become a thing like cunte?
Only get animals that can be trained or contained. My fish have yet to become a problem and my son is well trained.
Have a chill cat.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/Z5bdxm713CZry7BG6
Awww. Nice kitty!
Chonky.
Nice pussy!
Poor kitty has no legs…
LOL
No, that person is not a woman.
The dog stays away from the tree, the cowpoke, not so much. We tried a gate, but it looked terrible considering how much effort my wife puts into making the tree look nice each year
This year
last year
a few years ago, when the troublemaker was still with us (she was a good girl and we miss her)