Christmas Cats: A Literary Companion

Beth Adelman

There's an old legend that at midnight on Christmas Eve, all the animals in the world speak in human voices—a gift from God originally bestowed upon the animals in the manger in Bethlehem.

The legend originated in Eastern Europe, but it has echoes in many other stories from many cultures around the world. We humans long to understand the animals around us, and the closer we live with them, the deeper our longing. Our cats are members of our family, but as well as we come to know them, they are also always a little mysterious—part of us and yet apart. Sometimes we look at their exquisite faces and can't help wonder what they are thinking.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if they could tell us? I remember the thrill I experienced when I took a trip to Spain and was finally able to use my high school Spanish to understand and be understood in another language. I felt as if I had opened up a new world. How much more thrilling—and more elusive—it is to communicate with another species.

In fact, we humans have been trying to do just that for decades, teaching apes to use sign language and parrots to talk. And even sneaking into the barn on Christmas Eve, hoping for a miracle. In all these efforts, we expect the animals to speak our language. As unreasonable as this is (after all, we're supposed to be the smarter ones), the animals do their best to accommodate us. Their limits seem not to be in their ability and desire to use our language, but in their physical makeup. Apes have the manual dexterity required to sign and birds have the syrinx that enables them to make a variety of complex sounds. But most animals lack the hands and the voice needed to communicate the way we do.

So where does that leave our cats? Actually, it leaves them with an astonishing array of body postures, facial expressions, sounds (cats can make more than one hundred distinctive vocal sounds, while dogs make about ten), and even ways of manipulating their fur and whiskers, all of which they use to tell the world exactly what's on their minds. And that's not counting the scent and visual markers they leave behind for later reading. So while we're waiting for a Christmas miracle, maybe all we really need is a feline-English dictionary.

Our cats, of course, have never needed a dictionary. They've already got the interspecies communication thing figured out. They are masters at reading our little gestures, body postures, and facial expressions. They know just from looking at us when we are mad, scared, sick, happy, ready to go to bed, or ready to play with them. They notice the little things we do that we're not even aware of. We may be able to hide things from our mothers, but we can't hide anything from our cats.

When it comes to communicating with us, they try hard to speak to us the way we prefer. The same study that counted how many types of vocalizations cats are capable of also found that they vocalize a lot more to us than they do to other cats. In other words, cats noticed all on their own that while they communicate mainly with scents and body postures, we communicate mainly with sounds. So they speak to us with more sounds and fewer postures, hoping we'll get the idea.

Then why don't we? Why does communicating with them seem so elusive? Why do we think we need a miracle?

I think it's because we humans rely so heavily on communicating with words that when the words aren't there, we don't really trust ourselves to understand. We live so closely with our cats that we usually know what they want and we often know what they're thinking. We understand them, but we don't believe we do.

There are times when my cats look very earnestly into my eyes, their faces clearly marked with emotion. Sometimes they squeak or yip or meow. Sometimes they use their body posture to lead me somewhere (usually a place where they can settle down next to me). Sometimes they simply tremble with delight that I am looking at them and softly saying their names. At all these times, they are communicating with me with supreme sincerity, and I try to be equally sincere in my attempts to understand them. Often that means just quieting my mind and watching them carefully. When I do, I have flashes of understanding that might be insight or might be something more—I am not willing to rule out anything, because animals communicate in all kinds of ways we don't completely understand. The communication is real, and we have to trust the ways we experience it.

We are wise, I think, to be wary of interpreting our cats' messages as if they came from a human. "She thinks she's a person" is a cute thing to say about a cat, but it's also an easy way to lose the very special wonder of establishing a connection with another, decidedly nonhuman, species. Reaching out to our cats takes us outside ourselves in a way that opens up our minds and our hearts. But in our wisdom and our wariness about thinking of our cats as human, we sometimes ignore our intuition and limit the ways we are willing to understand the creatures in our midst. We don't trust what we know in our hearts to be true. So, for example, we want to believe our cats love us, but somehow, despite all the evidence of our lives with them, we're not sure if it's really true. If only they could say the words!

Until very recently, it was "accepted wisdom" among scientists that animals don't feel any emotions at all—not even love. Scientists came to this conclusion because the animals they studied had never described or shown their emotions in a way that the scientists could quantify in an experiment. But just because you can't study something scientifically doesn't mean it's not real.

One strange and sad result of this "accepted wisdom" was a conversation I had with a friend who is a school science teacher. She told me, "Whenever I sit down on the couch, my cat always sits right next to me and presses her head into my hands until I pet her. I know it's really all about food and my cat doesn't actually love me. But it's still so nice when she snuggles up with me, and I just tell myself it seems like love."

I said, "If it seems like love, why do you think it isn't?" But what I was really thinking was, How could any person live with a cat and think she doesn't feel fear, humor, excitement, grief, pleasure, and, most of all, love? There's no question that mealtimes are among the highlights of any cat's day, but so are play times, snuggle times, and purr times. How could every single friendly interaction we have with our cats be a bribe for food? Nobody wants to believe that. And so we wish that on Christmas Eve the animals would tell us, "You were right all along. Our love is the real thing."

In fact, they do tell us, if only we would trust our hearts. I know their love is real, and so do you.

How do I know? You might as well ask me how I know my husband loves me. I know because of the way he treats me, the way he looks at me, the way he seeks out my company and never seems to get bored with me, even after all these years. I know because things are more fun for both of us when he's around, because dire problems don't seem so dire when we're together, because he takes extra good care of me when I'm sick or just feeling low, because he puts me at the center of his life. He doesn't say "I love you" every day, but every day I know he does.

In their own way, my cats also do all of these things. They follow me from room to room—even pushing their way into the bathroom to be with me. They're not always right next to me, but they're usually nearby. When I sit down on the couch, they sometimes wrestle to decide who gets to sit next to me. If I'm in another room and they call to me, they keep calling until I answer. When I'm sick, they spend more time napping with me. When I'm sad, they snuggle up extra close. They would always rather play with me than with each other, and they make up games and then teach me the rules. They bring me their little mousey prey toys as gifts, dropping them at my feet and looking up at me with devotion. They run to my side when I call them—just for the reward of a hug. They purr when I look into their eyes and say their names. I know they love me because they act like they love me. That's how every creature on earth, human or animals, shows their love. It's how my cats know I love them.

You don't have to wait for Christmas. The miracle is already here, snuggled up next to you. Sometimes it's hard for us to trust the experience of our own lives and hearts. But when we observe our cats closely, with an open mind and an open heart, we see the richness of their emotional and their spiritual lives. We see it in the way they act. We see it in their faces. We see it in their eyes. When you do, trust what you see and feel. You know it's the real thing.