Merry Christmas

Somebody else wrote this, and I'm reposting it...

My dog does not know it is Christmas.

She watched lazily as the Christmas tree went up a few weeks ago, but was not disconcerted by it. I don't know what it says about our housekeeping that our dog, who knows our house the best, can find a six-foot tree growing out of the living room floor and find it no more remarkable than anything else in the room, but it can't be good. Even when it was strung with lights, she paid little attention. It was just another something in the room, a something in front of the window that blocked one of the few remaining squares of wintertime sunlight that still shines through the window each day. She resented the loss of that occasionally sun-drenched square of worn brown carpet, but seems to harbor no particular ill-will towards the tree itself.

The lights strung around a few windows and doorways likewise proved uninteresting. If they made noise, she probably would have noticed, but as simple strings of illumination she found them no more noteworthy than the stars in the sky outside; a simple quirk of wintertime weather, nothing more, to find stars inside the house in strings and rows, and hiding between the branches of a tree.


This of course all makes perfect sense, as my dog is not Saved, and would therefore have no reason to suspect Christmas was anything more than another day. Dogs have yet to have anyone die for their sins, and are therefore, according to most theologians, banned from heaven along with all other animals, plants, rocks, and the vast majority of human beings. I have never tried to explain heaven to my dog, and am not sure I could if I tried: aside from the language problem, I have my doubts that my dog would even accept the basic premise. Dogs tend to be literal creatures, not prone to belief in anything they cannot smell, hear, see, or bite. You can explain the concept of cow or skunk or deer or snake all you want, but the dog will not understand any of it until it suddenly happens upon one or the other of them in a field. Ah ha!, the dog will say. This is something new! And then the dog will classify it according to the very simple and entirely sufficient rules passed down by dogs from generation to generation. They will file it away in the parts of their brains that organize things into bigger than me or smaller than me, dangerous or not dangerous, delicious or not delicious, and so on, and then get on with their lives.

So I am not sure that a dog would understand the central concept of heaven, which is that God is so magnificent, magnanimous, and kind that He created an entire universe for us, surrounding a planet of immeasurable nuance and beauty, with more hidden meadows and grand vistas and deep, river-carved canyons than any one of us could explore in a hundred lifetimes, and He gave us existence itself, and that he is furthermore so magnificent, magnanimous and kind that He then devised a plan to save some of us from this selfsame miserable rathole of a universe he created and put us somewhere else, upon our death -- a place of brilliant light, and fluffy clouds, and absolutely no pain, or frustrations, or sadness, or embarrassment, or surprises, or explorations, or consequences.

In heaven, we will no longer work to be kind to all others; we will be kind by definition. In heaven, we will not be thwarted by the conflicting desires of others; there will be no such conflicts. In heaven, we will not need to work for our food; all we do is wish to eat, and magnificent food will appear, created for us by God. That is the central reward promised to us: if we momentarily behave ourselves, we shall be rescued by God from the often miserable existences He crafted for us, upon which God will wait on us hand and foot regardless of our further actions (there will be none, to speak of) or thoughts (there will be nothing left to think, after all), and cater to our every trifling whim like the most magnificent, magnanimous and kind butler each of us could ever hope for. For eternity.

Oh -- and we will each have a million billion dollars, not that we will ever need any of it.


I do not think, somehow, my dog would understand. It is not that she does not understand the concept of being waited on hand and foot: she already has that, after all, or something very close to it. It is not that she would not understand better places and worse places; as a puppy she survived in the suburban streets by learning to catch and kill rats, before we took her in. We were impressed by her ability to so quickly dispatch rats, but once we made the decision to take her in she never caught another rat again, ever, for these last eight years. She did it then, when she had to, but no more.

I think therefore she would also fully understand the concept that our reward for a lifetime of existing is to be allowed to continue to exist. She understood that well from her first year of life onwards; if this rat dies, I live. If I live, I will still exist tomorrow. (I am sure the rat saw things no differently, of course, at least not until the final seconds... I wonder what rough epiphany awaits, in the recesses of a rat mind, as the bones surrounding that mind begin to collapse around it?)

But I do not think our dog would grasp the concept that our reward for existence is to be able to reject existence itself, and that we call this our salvation. It seems like poor treatment of God, frankly, like a child being too obviously disappointed when they get a sweater for Christmas instead of the battery-powered ride-in miniature Jeep that they so earnestly wanted. Yes, our current lives are fine gifts, but when can we open the next one? Yes, the ability to feel joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, the ability to increasingly dominate the planet we live on and alter it towards our needs, and the creation of an inconceivably, unexploreably vast universe in which to test all those things -- those are amazing and precious things. But when can we leave them, and get on with the real life, the one in which we can remove ourselves from the vast majority of those precious things, but each of us is given the innate ability to play the harp?


My dog has watched from the sanctuary of her dog bed as Christmas arrived slowly, and in pieces. She has seen the tree go up, and the lights be strung. She has seen a constant parade of packages arrive via a constant parade of delivery people, each of whom was greeted in her best and most typical dog fashion, with a growling bark and rapidly wagging tail; apparently the friendly tail is to be used as a lure to draw the visitor closer, at which point the teeth will take over? Or is the barking meant to be an earnest warning against leaving without giving the rest of the dog the requisite pat? Unclear, but one of the better things about dogs is that even their most innermost conflicts are freely broadcast to the rest of the world. They may not be understandable, but they are visible.

My dog has watched while my daughter draws various Christmas related drawings and decorations. Christmas is a time for arts and crafts, when you are young, as are all other holidays. On Halloween, her class decorated paper bags to look like Jack O'Lanterns. On Thanksgiving, her class decorated plates to look like turkeys. For Christmas, her class decorated paper bags to look like Santa. Paper chains and snowflakes, paints and beads and ornaments: all these things are Christmas bling for seven year olds, but the dog has found no particular message in any of them. A seven year old can lose herself for a half hour, staring deep into the lights of the tree, pretending with dolls that it is the largest tree in the world, one that reaches far past the clouds, but if the dog has any such thoughts, she keeps them to herself.

On my daughter's behalf, my dog has endured the momentary indignities of the Reindeer Hat.

And the Santa Hat.


To the dog, any day with a visitor is a good day, and the quality of the day can be gauged by the number of visitors and how close to the dog they come. A delivery person coming to the door is grand, but a friend coming inside, now that is a fine event. And so Christmas is recognized only by an inexplicable flurry of activity, none of it particularly involving the dog. But then the visitors come not just to deliver a box or cardboard tube, but to stay a while, and the dog is happy. Eager greetings, fervent play, then quiet contentment.

The smells of food, not just of food but of Food, capitalized, fill the house. The one or two or three nightly dishes become six or ten or twelve, on Christmas night, and she wanders through the kitchen attempting to separate and categorize each. Both humans and dogs can agree on this one, central principle: celebrations involve, indeed revolve around, food. The more food, the bigger the celebration. Lights -- no. Ornaments -- no. Packages -- better, but not quite. Food, though, is a precious and holy thing, something to be treated with earnestness.

She does not understand heaven. She knows redemption only by living it; as an abstract concept, it is empty. But she does understand the difference between warm and cold. Outside the frost dusts the fields each night, lasting longer and longer into the morning as winter goes on. But the house is warm, or at least, warm enough for a dog, and that is more than sufficient. The rest of it she does not understand, and as she sleeps on her bed, pretending for the moment to ignore the activity around her, it is clear she does not care.