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!

(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.

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.

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.

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:

So there I shall rest.
Merry Christmas and
Happy Holidays, Everybody!
Love,
Captain Cassidy
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Today is an Off Topic Winter Wonderland!