The Christmas Rat that Tried to Ruin My Life

    The first thing you must understand about my tale is I don’t really enjoy Christmas.  It’s no one’s fault.  I don’t like looking at red, white, and green together.  I find the color scheme jarring and ugly.  I don’t like Christmas music.  I find it repetitive and boring.  I don’t like decorating for Christmas, because any kind of interior decorating stresses me out.  I’m not good at it.    

This leads me to a moment sometime this last summer where my husband and I were talking about our artificial Christmas tree.  It was HUGE and there was no place for it in the garage.  After some discussion, we decided we could put it in the loft of one of our sheds.  Up it went.  

Fast forward to ten days ago, my kids wanted to put up the Christmas tree.  I declined any involvement and left the whole thing to my husband and kids.  They got the tree out of the shed and brought it into the house.    

I wasn’t even home, but my husband called me.  

An animal had been living in the Christmas tree box.  It was too big to be a mouse and it was loose in my house.  Our son thought it was a rat, and he was the only person who had seen it.

I got home and promptly (and stupidly) started tearing my living room apart to try to find it.  I found it and it raced for the deck door… which stupidly, was not open.  Why did I look for it when I had no plan for what to do when I found it?

I trapped it in the laundry room.

My husband and I are humans and we figured out a plan to get it out of the laundry room.  We made a rat run so that when my husband chased it out of the laundry room, it would run along a path, straight to the deck doors and out of the house.

He went in with the broom.

The rat was a rat and had a completely different plan.  It got under the fridge and no matter what my husband did, he couldn’t get the rat to come out.

Now is time for a quick lesson on what kind of a rat it was.  Being from Alberta, this was the first rat I had ever seen.  It was brownish, which meant it was a roof rat.  It climbs trees and gets into people’s attics, which was why it was in the loft of our shed.

We trapped the rat in the laundry room and bought traps.  It wasn’t long before we found out it had chewed a hole in the wall and was hiding there.  Over the next few days, he also chewed a hole in a tube under my washing machine to get water, which flooded the laundry room and meant I could no longer do laundry.  Then the central vac died.  It’s still unclear as to whether or not that was the work of the rat.

Let’s talk about first-world fear.  Every time I heard a scratching sound, I thought about where that rat could be chewing and what parts of the house he could get into.  Being a rat, he's super dirty and my laundry room smelled like rat poop and pee.  Plus, he was tearing my insulation and sticking it outside his hole.  I couldn’t stop thinking about rat babies and what would happen if that rat was a pregnant mother.  I wasn't sleeping.  Every time I heard a scratching sound, my whole nervous system was set on fire and my heart pounded painfully.

I called a pest control company and they set out a dozen traps in my laundry room.

Then the rat started setting off the traps without getting caught in them.  Then I didn’t just hear the scratching, but the traps going off half the night.  There was evidence that he was getting stuck on the glue boards, but he was simply chewing his way out of them.

I have a book coming out next week and this whole situation has felt like the universe hoped to stall it because my brain was completely taken over by my rat.  How am I supposed to think of snow-covered love like the whisper of unseen worlds when I can’t stop thinking about what wires that little devil might be chewing?

It’s true that I don’t particularly enjoy the festival that Christmas has become, half celebrating winter and half celebrating Christ as a baby.  I am a Christian and I don’t get it.  When I think about Christ, I think of a man who understood human grief, who understood suffering, with nail prints in his palms, wrists, and side.  I think of the King of All, who conquered the trap that this world is and showed us the way through this life to the next.  He’s not a warm, soft baby.  That moment was so brief in the timeline of our world, it deserves celebrating… but I’ve never been good at celebrating.

However, I am good at praying and the God I pray to is good at answering.  

My daughter had to stay home from school one day, and she has a very strong stomach for a teenage girl.  So, she helped me dispose of the artificial Christmas tree that was littered with rat poop and smelling of rat pee.  She was there with me while I lifted up the branches and checked the box for more rats.  We learned that there was no rat’s nest in the box so it was unlikely that our rat is a pregnant female.  My daughter helped me clear out the rest of the mess in the shed and take it to the eco-center.  Having her there was a huge comfort.  She is not afraid of the things I am.

Then, my husband, who loves Christmas much more than I do, took me out to buy a new Christmas tree.  It’s a green tree that looks like it has been snowed on, which is quite nice here since there is no snow.  It’s also quite a bit smaller, so we won’t have problems storing it.  He took me to buy ornaments, which is something I’ve never done.  I’ve always made our Christmas ornaments.  My new ornaments are baby pink, chartreuse, navy, and so much silver and glass (okay, it’s plastic. I still have kids and a cat). 

And the Christmas decorations are actually pretty because everything old is gone.

Those are the little blessings.  Here’s the big one.  After a few days, I started praying that I would be able to calm down over this whole thing.  That rat was not going to be driven out of my house in one day, maybe not even in a week, and I needed to calm down.  And I have.  I calmed down enough that I completed the finishing touches on my book.  I have been able to sleep and get on with my life without terror or heart palpitations with every scratching sound.

What happened to my rat?

Yes, he’s still in the wall.  We’re still working on it, but the kind of inner peace I have felt has been the true gift of Christmas.  No, life isn’t perfect.  There are rats in some people’s walls, and some people wish their problem was that they had a rat in their wall instead of what they have to face. But whatever our problem, peace is there for those who are willing to ask and trust.

Merry Christmas!  

I’m going to go take a nap.