Carol Reiter: Holidays went pretty smooth

Christmas was pretty good this year -- my dogs and I got through it without any drama.

That's pretty good for my dogs, believe me. In the past, I have been sick during the holidays, and my dogs took advantage of that by eating everything that was loose in the house, hassling every cat on the property and generally being big nuisances.

But this year was pretty good. We only had a couple of bad days during the holidays.

And of course Len was at the center of those bad days. I truly believe that this big lug of a dog has a guardian angel that has helped keep Lenny alive for the past 9 ½ years. That's the only explanation I can think of, because otherwise I think that Len wouldn't have made it through 2009.

During the Christmas holiday, I had a lot of food around the house that normally isn't there. Food like candy and popcorn and breads and cookies.

And Len was in heaven. He could smell all of it, and he was positive that if he just waited long enough, he would be able to get to it and scarf it all down.

He almost succeeded.

Unfortunately for Len, I now have a blue-eyed puppy that rats out all the other dogs. Moss is a freckled bundle of unbridled joy, and he absolutely loves life. Moss spends his time looking for fun, and he's always up for playing with another dog, a cat, me, whatever.

For some reason, Moss likes Lenny. But Len doesn't like Moss. At all. Period. But Moss is too dumb, or just too ignorant, to realize how much Len hates him.

On Christmas Eve, I was in a pretty good mood. I had all my shopping done (for once), and I didn't have to work that day. I spent the day wrapping presents and trying to be nice to the dogs.

Because it was cold outside, I had let the dogs lounge around the house with me that day, instead of spending it in their respective kennels.

That was fine with Jan, Peg and Len, but Moss was wired. He showed off his jumping abilities, leaping from my bed to his crate, from my bed to the floor, from the couch to the floor, and he even tried to jump from the couch to the kitchen counter. I stopped that pretty quick, but he was still looking for fun.

When it was time to feed in the evening, I decided to leave the dogs in the house while I went out to the barn to feed Willy and the two weanling fillies, Itsy and Gia. I figured I'd be gone about five minutes, and what could those dogs do in five minutes?

But when I got out to the barn, I discovered that our little yellow hen, Chica, had hatched chicks. The psycho little hen, who grew up with cats and is meaner than heck, was being a good mom, defending those baby chicks against everything.

Everything including Willy. And that was bad news. Willy loves to stomp little things, and that little yellow hen and her chicks were fair game. The hen was attacking Willy with her feet, flying up at him again and again, while her brand-new chicks ran around peeping and getting way too close to Willy's big feet.

So I ended up spending a bit more time outside than I had planned. And Len took full advantage of that.

When I came back in the house, Moss greeted me with his eyes bugged out and his tongue hanging on the ground. I figured he had been playing, until I walked into the kitchen.

While I had been outside trying to save the lives of some innocent little baby chicks, Lenny was inside wreaking havoc. He had gotten a cupboard door open and found a loaf of bread. Len was lying in the middle of the kitchen floor, guarding what was left of the bread.

As soon as I saw Lenny, I said a bad word very loudly. Jan and Peg came trotting out of my bedroom, both of them licking their lips. Apparently all of the dogs, except poor Moss, had a great time with my bread.

I was mad, but what could I do? The bread was a loss, I might as well let the dogs eat what was left of it.

Then I saw a box of cookies on the floor. I should say, I saw what was left of the box that had held some cookies.

So I yelled, and I told Len that Santa was flying right past this house tonight, not one dog that I owned was going to get any gifts.

And you know what? They didn't get any gifts. The three bad dogs -- Jan, Peg and Len -- had blown it with the cookies and bread. And while Moss hadn't been part of this particular mess, he had done enough bad things in the past couple of months to make Santa pretty darn mad.

But my anger didn't last very long, and when my friend gave me a big box of doggie cookies for the dogs, I parceled them out to my bad dogs on the day after Christmas.

So in the end, I had a great Christmas and my dogs had a decent one. Which is more than they deserved, believe me.

Reporter Carol Reiter can be reached at (209) 385-2486 or creiter@mercedsun-star.com.