ROVER AND THE CHRISTMAS TREE

There were certain things that our dad always did, presumably because he was our dad and dads did those kinds of things.

Dad always carved the meat when we had a roast, and often, when he was in the mood, he would cook the entire Sunday lunch. He would wear a bath towel, tied around his ample middle, and he would use a tea towel as a makeshift oven glove. This tea towel would invariably find itself hanging on the plate warming rack which was on the edge of the grill, just above the oven’s back burner and every week mum lost another tea towel as it went up in flames when dad warmed up the tinned peas. Mum came to regard it as part of dad’s style of cooking, rather as if flambéed tea towel was his speciality.

One of the other things that dad always did was the Christmas decorations, including the all important Christmas tree. One year dad decided that our old artificial tree was getting a little tired looking and he announced with great aplomb that we were going to have a ‘real’ Christmas tree.

The great day came, a truck arrived outside and a man wearing one of those warehouse coats that always seem to look like they are made of greasy brown paper came up our path and left an eight foot Christmas tree leaning against the front wall of our house.

When dad came home he made a wooden base for the tree and shoehorned it into the corner of our front room. He festooned it with tinsel, baubles and electric lights. There was even a Christmas fairy which should have gone on top of the tree, but as the apex of the mighty spruce bent over along the ceiling she was placed somewhere ‘near’ the top of the tree.

All was going well, mum was summoned in to admire dad’s handiwork with the tree, but all she saw was the way that it was already distributing an even layer of needle-like leaves onto the carpet.

The best was yet to come. Seeing the tree arrive and, rather than being co-opted into dragging the thing into the house, I decided that the best thing to do was to make a tactical withdrawal, so I took Rover for a walk around the field.

Rover and I had gone out and returned via the back door, after the tree had been brought into the house. Rove was confined to the kitchen while the tree was being solemnly decorated and he had not seen it come into the house.

Eventually the decorating was finished and my sisters had arranged the figures in the crib, complete with cotton wool snow around the entrance and many cast-off farmyard toys including six cows a shire horse and a couple of very un-Kosher pigs all standing around the Holy family, three wise men and a pottery figurine of Cinderella.

Rover was allowed to return to the front room.

He must have thought that it was Christmas, for there in the corner of the room was an eight foot tree, which he examined thoroughly, first from a distance, then close up sniffing all around it, then after walking away and turning around quickly to look again in case it was an illusion, finally he walked up to it again and, in a casual fashion, cocked his leg and watered it.

Dad sprang out of his chair, newspaper flailing in the air, to chase the leaking dog out of the room.

The tree suffered for this episode, two feet of its trunk were cut off and it ended up in a large plant pot, standing on an occasional table so that it could be kept away from a very disappointed dog whose Christmas present had been taken away.