Linus and Olaf are not too bothered about Christmas, for them the main attraction is screwed up balls of wrapping paper to play with. I stopped putting up a big tree and now just have a small one that stands about 14" high and fits perfectly on the end of the mantlepiece. If Linus and Olaf ever mature into sensible, trustworthy cats then I may get a big tree again.
Holly on the other hand
knows all about Christmas and loves it. She is not keen on loud noises and hates crackers being pulled when she is in hearing distance. Unless she is pulling the cracker. One year I held out a cracker to her for her to sniff at, only she grabbed the end in her mouth and pulled! Oh what fun she had, she 'won' the cracker pull and now had the majority of a cracker, a hat, joke and toy. I managed to pick the toy up and move it out of reach because she was too busy shredding the cracker, hat and joke trying to find the snap. She has pulled a lot of crackers since then, has shredded a lot of hats and is still trying to find the snap.
Holly does not like wearing clothes, it's only the past year or so that she has started to accept being loosly covered by a blanket when it's cold. However she loves her tinsel and jingle-bell collars and will do anything to avoid me when I try to take it off her. At her first christmas I had a spare piece of tinsel so I wrapped it round a spare collar and put it on her for Christmas day expecting her to wriggle out of it and shred it. But she wore it all day and looked longingly at it on Boxing day waiting for me to put it on her again. Since then I have made her a jingle-bell collar, a fleecy jester-style ruff with a bell on the end of each spike. She loves that one too but only gets to wear it for short periods of time as it can be very noisy.
She also knows what presents are and loves to open them and shred the wrapping paper before playing with her new toy.
Holly in 2005 with her newly made jingle collar
the suspicious look was due to being made to sit still and have her photo taken rather than being allowed to run round and have fun.
