I love tinsel on my Christmas tree. It reminds me of my childhood and Mom yelling at us for throwing up the tinsel in clumps instead of gently stringing it on the branches. But I loved the way the colored lights danced across the long silver strands, making them looked like colored icicles.

For years, we didn’t have tinsel, because my sister’s cats Pippin and Merry loved it. Merry only played with it, but Pippin ate it. And tinsel is not good for cats. I didn’t know that until one morning I woke up to this strange sound. I turned around, and there is Pippin doing “The Accordian” next to me. When he starts doing that, it only means two things – he’s trying to hack up a hairball or upchuck. Unfortunately, it was the latter.

And was a golf-ball sized ball of tinsel that smelled really, really bad.

From then on in, until my sister moved out with the cats, we had no tinsel. However, for the past four years, tinsel has graced the end of each branch. Obi, our dog, never seemed too bothered by the tree, and beside an occasional nosing of one of the ornaments, she’s left it alone. Until this year, when she decided to be a cat and eat the tinsel off the bottom of the tree.

Now we’re watching her to make sure she doesn’t get sick. It doesn’t look like we’ll have tinsel on the tree for the foreseeable future – or at least on the first foot or so of tree Obi can reach.