“Be sure to hang the delicate ornaments high,” said Polly, my stepmom. “Jake might mistake the colorful glass balls for his toys and try to bite them.”
Jake was new to our family that Christmas. He was a beautiful brown and white puppy, with giant puppy feet and a supremely expressive face. And of course, he was loaded with the puppy curiosity that makes everything a toy.
Two weeks before Christmas we brought out the boxes of ornaments, many of which had been in Polly’s family for ages. Among them were many handmade treasures, including a special box that held an entire gingerbread family. They were real cookies, hung with red ribbons, made with love by one of Polly’s relatives many years earlier, and lovingly preserved.
Every now and then I or one of my little sisters — Ruth and Sue — would pretend we were going to nibble one, knowing that Polly would say, “You’ll break a tooth! They’re so old that they’re rock hard and tasteless.” We didn’t really want to eat them, but we enjoyed teasing Polly.
Since we didn’t know how Jake would react to the ornaments or the tree itself, we were careful to put delicate or potentially dangerous ornaments up high. No glass balls or ornaments, nothing small enough to choke him, no tinsel or lights. Jake sniffed the tree a lot, probably puzzled and delighted that the outside was inside. Those first couple of days Polly caught him starting to lift a leg on the tree, twice. But he learned quickly and settled for sniffing from a distance.
The weekend before Christmas, Dad and Polly had a great idea. “That new holiday movie is playing at the theater. Let’s all bundle up and go see it at the drive-in.” Excited… we loaded into the car with our blankets, our pillows and our bags of homemade popcorn and off we went for a great evening.
A few hours later, we returned home, and opened the front door to find… a terrible mess. No, it wasn’t the Christmas tree. In fact, we weren’t sure what it was. We stood just inside the door, staring at big brown chunks of… something. We all looked at each other sideways, fearing the worst, and wondering who would be brave enough to see what it was. As it turned out, the mess was Jake’s bed, which he’d destroyed. Left alone for the first time, he must’ve gotten bored, attacked it and left it for dead. We didn’t know then that the bed was not the only casualty.
The next morning was Saturday, so we girls were in the living room. I waited for American Bandstand to come on, while Ruth and Sue watched cartoons. I noticed that they weren’t sitting in their usual TV-watching spots. Instead they were very close to the Christmas tree. We weren’t allowed to touch any of the presents, but we could look. So Ruth and Sue “took inventory” frequently, checking carefully to see if any more packages with their names on them had magically appeared.
“Nothing new for me,” said Sue. “Just a new one for Dad.” Ruth continued to look, leaning in every direction as far as she could, without touching. Then something caught her eye.
“Hey, who broke Gingerbread Baby?” she asked, accusingly.
That brought Polly out of the kitchen and into the living room fast. “Where? Show me!.” Ruth pointed out the former baby cookie, which was now just a head, still tied to the tree by its red ribbon.
“Here’s another broken one,” said Sue. “It’s Gingerbread Grandpa. Or it was. Now it’s just his head and his hat and part of his bow tie.”
That caused a flurry of inspection, and soon it was clear that four members of the gingerbread clan — Baby, Grandpa, Aunt and Uncle — had been reduced to gingerbread heads.
“I didn’t do it,” I said… just in case anybody thought I’d had a midnight snack of rock-hard ornaments. Quickly my sisters echoed me with denials of their own. In unison, we girls and Polly all looked at Dad. If anyone was famous for midnight snack raids, it was him.
“Not me,” he said. “I’m holding out for some fresh gingerbread cookies.”
Polly stared intently at the gingerbread catastrophe, then she realized, only the low-hanging cookies were affected. As if in slow motion, she turned, and said “Jacob!” Till that moment Jake had been sitting by Dad, looking happy as ever. Suddenly, his posture changed and he looked as guilty as if he’d been caught with Gingerbread Grandpa in his mouth. With his head bowed a little he tried not to meet Polly’s gaze, but it was clear what had happened. He may as well have been wearing a sign that said, “I killed three generations of an innocent family. And it was totally worth it!”
We learned a lesson that year. To Jake, rock-hard, decades-old gingerbread cookies were just a different flavor of dog bone. Every Christmas from that time on, when the ornaments came out, the first thing we did was hang the survivors of the gingerbread massacre, as well as the four gingerbread heads, high up on the tree, out of Jake’s reach. And every year, he’d stare up longingly, as if remembering those tasty “dog treats” he enjoyed in his first Christmas season.
Teresa Ambord is a former accountant and Enrolled Agent with the IRS. Now she writes full time from her home, mostly for business, and about family when the inspiration strikes.