It’s been two years since we’ve put up a Christmas tree in our house. In 2006, we were too busy with me graduating and the Engineer putting down new floors in the living room. Plus, we didn’t spend Christmas at home, but were with our parents in Middle/West Tennessee. The same applied for 2007 except the floors and graduating part.

Since my parents have opted to come see us in Knoxville this year, I knew we had to put up the tree.

I’m happy with our tree this year. It’s kinda sparse on ornaments (I didn’t want to overdo and I didn’t want to put any ornaments at the bottom where the cats could eat them) but is really lovely at night with it’s clean white lights.

My biggest concern though was the cats. Sophie had only been with us for one Christmas where we had a tree but Buster had never even seen a Christmas tree. I knew that our poor, artificial tree was in for it.

To Buster’s credit, he waited three whole days before scaling the tree. Kudos to him!

Investigating... "Hey.. this looks like a great place to climb"

"I'm just going to get a little closer"

"We have lift off"

"Hey... this tree is pretty sturdy!"

"And now.. for a little snack.."

Thankfully, our tree is very sturdy and while it swayed a bit, it didn’t even look like was going to fall over. And EVERY.SINGLE.ORNAMENT stayed in place.

Tree 1, Cat 0