Brendan Fraser Fir and the Feline Escape Artist

This is the fourth Christmas in a row that my family has bought a 10-foot-tall Christmas tree to put in our backporch/sunroom. I guilted my parents into getting another 10er this year because I'm a sucker for traditions. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. My brothers weren't home yet and my Dad was at work, so my Mom and I put up the tree by ourselves. Our first obstacle was that we had left the tree outside overnight and the water it was sitting in was frozen solid into a block of ice. After my Mom dragged the enormous Fraser Fir into the sunroom to defrost, she got her hammer and ice pick (screw driver) and put on her protective eye gear (sunglasses - because we didn't want a Monica Gellar Thanksgiving incident) and started her glacial archeological dig - chipping away at the block of ice so that we could put it in the tree stand. I equated our glacial expedition to the movie 'Encino Man' (minus the California earth quake, nix the whole digging a pool in the back yard, and replace the caveman with a pine tree and it's totally the same thing), and my brilliant mother dubbed our tree with the name "Brendan Fraser Fir". It was an enlightening moment. You know how people always ramble on about how "all the planets were aligned" and all that jazz? Well, this was that moment for us, but on a much smaller scale. So I guess we can say that all Santa's reindeer were perfectly aligned at that exact moment. I'm definitely leaving them Reindeer Corn next Christmas. (Reindeer Corn is Candy Corn, except it's red, green, and white for Christmas).  

Our glacial archeological expedition 

Somehow the two of us successfully put up the tree, and that evening, my Dad helped me string up the lights. I was up on the rung of the ladder above the one that says "DO NOT stand above this point" when I heard a muffled digging noise - like the sound my cat makes when she rubs her paws repeatedly against a door. So I look at the door that leads to the laundry room from the sunroom, but something outside catches my eye. My cat is outside! She's been an indoor cat for 15 years! And suddenly, somehow, she's outside, at night, in the below freezing weather that caused our Encino Evergreen to turn into a block of ice! I just start yelling "let the cat in the house!" three or four times until my Mom finally understands the situation and jumps up to open the sliding glass door. Satin slowly walks back into the house and my Mom slams the door behind her. Man that cat is getting frisky in her old age. We have no idea how long she was out there, but she must have snuck out the kitchen door with all of the frequent traffic coming through it. Thank goodness she wanted to come back inside!