I don’t really celebrate Christmas as a religious thing, but I do celebrate it culturally. I love the festive decorations, the hope for kindness and light, the focus on loved ones and giving. Even in difficult times, there’s still something for me to enjoy in this season with the people around me.

Sarah’s favorite Christmas song is a John Denver and the Muppets song whose lyrics begin with:

I don’t know if you believe in Christmas
Or if you have presents underneath a Christmas tree
But if you believe in love
That will be more than enough
For you to come and celebrate with me
For I have held the precious gift that love brings
Even though I never saw a Christmas star
I know there is a light I have felt it burn inside
And I have seen it shining from afar

I absolutely detest most Christmas carols, but I love that one.

(My long-running hatred for Christmas carols has many, many roots. I’ll hate them less when stores play fewer of them and when the recordings of them improve. I’m not holding my breath.)

So in the spirit of the season, Sarah and I decided to try to do a Christmas tree again this year. We have struggled to put one up since we brought Tadashi into the house at the end of 2019 because, frankly, we don’t trust the little bugger with it. One year, we put up the tree and lights and no ornaments and he still climbed into it every day. One year we did a couple ornaments and he pulled half of them off. And I lost count of how many times he tried and succeeded at knocking the thing over.

He’s 12 pounds of mischief and he’s a cat. What did we expect?

But in the new condo, there’s a really nice spot for a tree near the door to the second bedroom, and that door allows us to anchor the tree by tying it to something through the crack of the hinge so at least it can’t be pulled completely over.

It’s been a journey. At first we just put the tree up, nothing on it.

Tadashi climbed it and started chewing on every branch he could reach.

We tried to block off the bottom, but that got too annoying to deal with AND Tadashi just moved the stuff to get back to the branches.

So we sprayed the tree with something that smelled funny in the hope it would drive him off.

Nope.

Then I gave up and took the bottom row off the tree. It’s a fake tree, decades old, that my mom gave me years ago. It’s the kind where each branch has a hook on the end you stick into the metal pole up the center. So we removed the entire bottom row.

And guess what? Tadashi couldn’t quite reach it to chew on it.

Also, he didn’t like climbing into it nearly as well because the second row from the bottom has fewer branches and they’re less steady.

Is it keeping him completely out of the tree? No.

But it’s an improvement.

(Tadashi likes the tree. He did not like being Lion King-ed in front of it for pictures.)

Returning to the season, though, and also returning to John Denver, a friend of ours took us to see the John Denver: A Rocky Mountain Holiday performed by the MN Orchestra. I really didn’t know John Denver until I met Sarah, who gave me a thorough crash course in his music back in college. Now those songs are staples of our music library. Of course, John Denver himself is tragically long gone, but the performance was put together by his estate and former bandmates and included a ton of footage of him performing the same songs live. It gave it a wonderful, bittersweet feeling of loss and hope. I genuinely cried through most of the performance.

And yeah, I rolled my eyes at the songs with religious themes that don’t hold meaning to me. I didn’t sing along on “Silent Night” or “O Holy Night” and things like that because those songs aren’t for me. But I sang “Annie’s Song” to Sarah and laughed along with her and our friends on “Grandma’s Featherbed” and nearly shouted my way through “Take Me Home, Country Roads” along with the audience.

The thing about this season is that not every part of it belongs to me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a place in it. I can leave the Christian part aside and enjoy the hope and the spirit and Santa Claus. I can skip the songs about Jesus and sing about peace.

I think, especially now, finding commonalities with the strangers around me is maybe the best thing I can do with myself. More than ever, I think I need to focus on how we are all alike, not how we are different.

I’ll leave you with a few more words from John Denver and the Muppets:

For the truth that binds us all together
I would like to say a simple prayer
That at this special time you will have true peace of mind
And joy to last throughout the coming year

And if you believe in love
That will be more than enough
For peace to last throughout the coming year
And peace on Earth will last throughout the year