Reading Time: 3 minutes

Hi and welcome back! Today, let’s just have a nice off-topic Winter Wonderland to celebrate whatever joy we can find in this blasted-out dumpster fire of a year. Let me show you how my Christmas photoshoot idea went!

she was having none of my wacky plans
My Christmas photoshoot, in a nutshell.

(Some previous Christmas-related posts: Away in a Manger; The Christmas Miracle: Speaking in Tongues at the Company Party; Christmas Services Seem Weird This Year; That Time Biff Pulled a Sword on My Best Friend During the Christmas Pageant; The Tantrum on Christmas.)

“It’ll Be Fun,” I Said. “A Christmas Photo,” I Said.

It seemed like such a simple idea: a holiday picture of Bother to adorn today’s post.

I had not yet reckoned with my furry orange hostess. I’d figured I could bribe her with her favorite treat to sit still enough to take a picture.

This plan went about as well as one might expect.

blurry bother cat
Out of 72 photos, most looked very similar to this one.

Spoiler: It Was, But Not in the Way I Wanted.

To borrow some lingo from behaviorists, Bother has turned out to be very, well, food-motivated.

GET IT QUEEN BOTHER
Of the dozen somewhat-non-blurry photos, almost all contain my hand and the actual treat.

In plain terms, she is a treat-seeking missile. Unfortunately, she’s also absolutely single-minded regarding her favorite treat (chicken-flavored tube goo).

Thus, in those very few photos where she wasn’t blurred or actively consuming the bribery treat, it’s painfully obvious that she’s looking straight at the treat and about to lunge toward it.

Nothing on my reel was quite the “spirit of Christmas” heartwarming photo I wanted.

christmas photoshoot
Treat-Seeking Bother Missile.

But in the end, ain’t that how it goes?

The Reality of the Situation.

Real life so rarely plays nicely with our loftiest hopes.

I’m not mad, of course. Bother’s a cat. She’s smart for a cat and she knows a few tricks, though none of them involve sitting perfectly still and being photogenic please for the LOVE of CRIMINY, CAT.

On this lovely Christmas day, we’re all here, we’re in as good of health as one can hope in our respective situations, and we’re together. Really, I guess it’s just icing on the tube-goo cake that I got one shot that turned out about as well as one could ask in the situation, even if it makes Bother look like an orange-tabby Grumpy Cat:

grumpy bother sitting amid christmas detritus
She looks like she’s had about enough of my wacky Christmas photoshoot plan. And yes, I put the bows away immediately after I was done. Strangely, she wasn’t at all interested in them, but still.

So there I shall rest.

Merry Christmas and

Happy Holidays, Everybody!

Love,
Captain Cassidy


Please Support What I Do!

Come join us on FacebookTumblrPinterest, and Twitter!(Also Instagram, where I mostly post cat pictures.)

Also please check out our Graceful Atheist podcast interview

If you like what you see, I gratefully welcome your support. Please consider becoming one of my monthly patrons via Patreon with Roll to Disbelieve for as little as $1/month! My PayPal is captain_cassidy@yahoo.com (that’s an underscore in there) for one-time tips.

You can also support this blog at no extra cost to yourself by beginning your Amazon shopping trips with my affiliate link — and, of course, by liking and sharing my posts on social media!

This blog exists because of readers’ support, and I appreciate every single bit of it. Thank you. <3

Today is an Off Topic Winter Wonderland!

ROLL TO DISBELIEVE "Captain Cassidy" is Cassidy McGillicuddy, a Gen Xer and ex-Pentecostal. (The title is metaphorical.) She writes about the intersection of psychology, belief, popular culture, science,...

Subscribe
Notify of
0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments