The (K)9 Days of Christmas

It’s Christmas time! Are you and your dog ready? I think we can all agree that if anyone deserves to enjoy Christmas, it’s our dogs. They’ve got that good cheer even when the rest of us are grumpy, as might happen now and then, especially in a year with no movies, no restaurants, no travel, and no physical contact with non-nuclear loved ones. In fact, one could argue that they deserve Christmas more than we do!

So why shouldn’t they get it? A dog-year is only 52 days long (by the old rule that one human year = seven dog years). Why shouldn’t every dog-year include a dog-Christmas? If you agree, then your dog should be celebrating Christmas not only on Dec 25, but also on Feb 15, Apr 8, May 30, Jul 21, Sep 11, and Nov 2! Have you been short-changing your pooch??

Recent advances¹ in biological science involving telomeres and mammalian DNA methylomes and whatnot have shown a logarithmic relationship between dog aging and years as measured by humans (I mentioned this before here). That relationship can be expressed by

Maybe, if you really want to do right by your pups, you should start by synchronizing their dog-Christmases with their physiological ages, using the above formula. This will result in more Christmases per people-year when they’re younger, balanced by fewer when they’re older.

Here’s a handy calendar of nonlinear dog-Christmases, each indicated by an orange highlight. It assumes Fido was born on Jan 1, 2021. These logarithmic formulas go kind of crazy when you put in values close to zero, so I started counting only when the dog has reached one nonlinear dog-year old, on Feb 26 (let’s face it, anyone younger than one year old doesn’t really get Christmas anyway).

This is great! When the dog is just a puppy, it seems like almost every day is Christmas! This is so great, in fact, that I’m thinking maybe it should be applied to humans too. Imagine if when you were young, you didn’t have to wait a whole 365 days for the next Christmas to roll around?

So I took the above dog formula and stretched it out to match a human life span, and produced a formula that provides more Christmases when you are young, balanced out by less when you are old, so that by the time you reach age 70, you will have experienced 70 Christmases.

If you used this formula to calculate when to celebrate human-Christmas:

    you’d get 38 Christmases by the time you were ten years old!! You’d celebrate another eleven by the time you were twenty. Each decade there­after would be fewer, until in your seventh decade you’d only get three. That’s not very many Christmases for us old folks, true, but you got ’em while you were young and could enjoy them better. That’s fair, right?

But I’ve strayed from my topic of dog-Christmas. Okay, so whenever you plan to celebrate Christmas with your dog, what’s an appropriate present? Here’s the list of what’s most popular with pups in 2020 (to be fair, this list is pretty much the same every year):

FIRST CHOICE: treats or any food.

SECOND CHOICE: toys, sticks, shoes, or any other object in the world.

THIRD CHOICE: dog DNA test, a dental cleaning, or fake antlers. Literally, the best you can hope for with these gifts is that they don’t mind them much.

And what to watch when celebrating dog-Christmas? I looked, but found relatively few dog-centric Christmas offerings on TV. The 12 Pups of Christmas sounded promising. It’s a Hallmark-y romcom that was redeemed (IMO) by having both romantic leads be unapologetic jerks that got to stay that way even after they found True Love. But the titular Labrador puppies, while they provided high-grade puppy eye-candy whenever on screen, actually had nothing at all to do with the plot. Come to think of it, Christmas didn’t have anything to do with the plot either.

Raised by Wolves, a new sci-fi series on HBO, while it seems good, didn’t fare any better as a dog-Christmas show. But at least it didn’t have a bait-and-switch title. The protagonists were rationalists who didn’t believe in religious sentimentality, and the wolves turned out to be metaphors for . . . well, I won’t spoil the plot by giving too much away.

My best dog-Christmas find was that old stand-by, How The Grinch Stole Christmas. (Not any of the new, dreadful movies, though: it has to be the 1966 cartoon version, with Boris Karloff reading the story. Also acceptable would be simply reading the original story aloud to your doggie.) Now, this is a tale that can grip a canine’s imagination—the hero Max has adventures (snow!), existential crises (he has to wear fake antlers), and a satisfyingly triumphant conclusion (roast beast).

However, whenever, and with whom- or what-ever you are celebrating the holidays, may they be safe and joyous, and virus-free!

Till next time,
  Trentin “Tin-tin” Quarantino

Editor's note: did I happen to mention that Kathleen and I are getting a new puppy for Christmas? His name is Louis, and he'll be arriving on Christmas Eve Eve. What could be better than finding a new puppy under the Christmas tree! (Except of course there's no tree this year because, well, there's a new puppy.)


Thanks,
Dorn
12/15/2020