Washington Post Op-Ed: Getting a Puppy Was the Best Worst Christmas Idea Ever, by Megan McArdle:
There is little in this world 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 his eyes.
The reality, however, is something of a wreck. … 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. …
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 glamorous 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 them 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 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?” …
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 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, however, 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, one inseparable from the other. …
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.
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