Back Story: We wish you a Merry Christmas

It was a dark and stormy night

You might remember that last Saturday night was a page torn from the book of hell. We had our granddog, Rhesus, over for a sleepover. Whenever he sleeps at our house I put his kennel in my office and sleep on the day bed in there, so I can hear him if he wakes up during the night. The forecast was for stormy weather, so Amy decided to sleep down the hall in the guest room with our own dog, Suki, who has problems with thunder and lightning.

I can’t recall ever hearing anything like the rolling thunder we had that night. There was never any let-up in the racket. It carried on for hours. Around 2:30, I went to the living room and turned on the TV to see if there were any tornado warnings. That’s how bad it was. The fact that I couldn’t find any storm related information on the tube was of no comfort. The “Storm Center” meteorologists must have been asleep.

While I was up, the power kicked off and came right back on again. I unplugged the TV, grabbed a flashlight and went back to bed. Beelzebub’s bowling bash continued on for another hour or so through a second quick power interruption, before it finally faded away. I slept not a minute during that whole time. Rhesus must have fared better, because he was up and ready to hit the backyard around 7 a.m.

That’s what kept me up last Saturday night. Amy’s story is quite different.

The Nightmare Before Christmas

Amy was exhausted when she went to bed early. She was so tired the thunder never woke her. But, around 2 a.m., she was startled awake by the faint strains of a familiar tune she couldn’t quite identify. The muffled sounds seemed to be coming from Suki’s kennel. In her delirium, recalling stories of dogs swallowing cell phones and other strange appliances, Amy crawled out of bed, opened the cage where Suki was asleep on her back with all four legs straight up in the air, and put her ear to the dog’s stomach - nothing – nothing but the rumbling of fermenting Puppy Chow and Beggin’ Strips. One can only imagine what the dog thought.

The music stopped, so she went back to bed without figuring out where it had been coming from. Soon she was awakened again by the same sound. She crawled around the room, but could not find the source. She knocked on the door to our son’s room, where he was still up, playing some late night Internet video game, and enlisted him in the search.

“Do you hear that,” she asked when he entered the guestroom.

“It’s a Christmas carol,” he said. “'We Wish You a Merry Christmas'.”

As soon as he said that, she knew what was happening. She remembered that she had stored some unused Christmas cards in a box near the dog’s kennel. One of them must have been a musical card. She found the box and smacked it hard one time. The playing stopped. She went back to bed, but shortly the music started again. This time she took the whole box and put it in the adjacent laundry room and shut the door. The music had ceased, but it woke her again about an hour later, even from behind the closed door. Finally, she got up, tore through the box, located the card and destroyed it.

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The chickens were dining on table scraps from the last night’s dinner, the dogs were playing keep-away with a beat up Frisbee in the backyard, and I was already on my second cup of coffee, when Amy finally made her way to the kitchen Sunday morning.

“I had a rough night,” she said.

“Thunder keep you awake?” I asked.

“What thunder?”

-vh