Our Best Worst Christmas Idea Ever ...

There is little more charming than the idea of a Christmas puppy. The festive music, the cooing family, that adorable little face with the holiday lights shining from its eyes.The reality, however, is something of a wreck.

There you are trying to bake Christmas cookies, close out the year-end books or shepherd the kids through pageants and parties … and there is the puppy, needing to be let out every two hours. The time not spent mopping up accidents will instead be devoted to keeping the puppy from chewing on the tree, swallowing ornaments or knocking over the Nativity scene. And you will be trying to manage this on too little sleep, because, did I mention? The puppy needs to be let out every few hours, including at night.

My husband and I knew all this, all the reasons against it, and then went ahead and got a Christmas puppy anyway.

Our miniature bullmastiff was, as expected, adorable: the melting eyes, the oversize paws, the mini crocodile teeth that he ineptly tried to maul us with. We named him Huckleberry and drove him back from Indiana to our home in Washington, D.C., through hills dusted with a fairy mist of snow.

The mist iced the roads and dropped the visibility to about four feet, forcing us to make an emergency overnight stop at a dismal motel. Little Huck’s eyes widened at his first snow. He dipped his precious little snout into the strange substance, gave the most darling sneeze—then resolutely refused to do his business on that ridiculous stuff. We had to resort to a puppy pad in our bathroom, which made the motel room smell like a New York subway station in high summer.

But as far as we were concerned, it was sweet perfume, and we fell asleep in a fog of happiness.

For all the chaos, there is something intensely right about a Christmas puppy, because Christmas is love, and love is not the picture-perfect moment when everyone is carefully arranged in front of an eminently Instagrammable tree. It’s all the less glamourous things you do to get to the fleeting snapshot. Having a puppy teaches you this very quickly.

Forget the innumerable movies in which a child’s eyes meet a ­puppy’s­—love at first sight—because you don’t really love puppies when you get them. You are charmed and delighted by them and a little terrified by how tiny and frail they are. But the true love comes later, after long nights standing outside in the frigid dark and muttering, “Can you please go already?” and long days chasing them away from this and that, and many anxious moments Googling things such as “arugula dog toxic?”

Photo Credit: Megan McArdle/ The Washington Post

Those moments are liberally leavened by their charms: the quizzical looks, the comic determination of their playing, the sighs of perfect contentment as they burrow into your side for a nap. But you don’t get a puppy because you want to watch one looking cute. (You can do that for free on TikTok.) You want the trouble, because the trouble is what makes the rest of it so rewarding.

What is true of puppies is true of people: Love is what we do for others. And I don’t just mean that sacrifice is the truest expression of love, though of course it is. Sacrifice might reflect our love, but it also creates it; it is the investment that generates the return.

In the past two years, I have lost my parents (as well as Huck’s predecessor), and what surprised me most was how sad I was not to be able to do anything for them anymore. I had expected to miss visits and phone calls—and I did. But I also missed cleaning the house and fixing electronics and haggling with doctors. The years of elder­care had been overwhelming, but also had deepened my love for them into something it could never have been if I had not returned, in some small measure, all the years they had sacrificed for me. We do not truly know how much we care for someone until we have taken care of them.

For believers, this helps answer the question critics have asked of Christianity since its beginning: Why did an all-powerful God need to be born to a woman and die on the cross? For Christians, this is the ultimate perfection of love: Humanity is united to him by our need and his suffering. The joyous birth presages both redemption and sacrifice; they are inseparable.

You don’t need to be a believer, however, to perceive that underneath the tinsel, the true joy of Christmas is generous, willing, wholehearted sacrifice. Dinner might burn, gifts disappoint, decorations wilt, but the work that went into them, and the love we felt as we did it, remain undiminished. Indeed, it is often the disasters that become our fondest stories, beginning with “Remember when … ?” And for good reason: They remind us that we gave ourselves, despite everything, which is the one Christmas gift that cannot break or wear out.

We often speak of Christmas as the end of the year, the culmination of the holiday season. But in fact, it’s a promise to the future—of more love, deeper love, love that will endure even after there’s an empty space in front of the hearth or a missing chair at the table. And this is why you get a Christmas puppy, against all reason. For the rest of the year, and forever, you will have the best part of Christmas every day.

The Washington Post (24 December 2024), Copyright © 2024 by The Washington Post

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