The same shoebox of photographs that produced puzzle season kept giving. Four days later it produced December.
The tree that year was the brush kind — wire branches, glass ornaments, a paper train made by small hands hanging front and center. It went up next to the sliding door, which happened to put it directly beside the cat tree, and that accident of floor plan settled everything that followed.
The division of labor
They split the season the way they split everything. Paradox took the high post on the cat tree, level with the ornaments, close enough to audit each one and — this is the remarkable part — touching none of them. Howl took the blanket underneath the branches and treated it as the entire point of the holiday: a warm spot, festively covered, directly below the lights.
The tree survived the season intact. Every ornament kept its branch, the paper train kept its place of honor, and both supervisors kept their posts through New Year's. It remains the most peaceful December on record, and nobody knows quite how.