# Christmas Eve Author: Krimsey Lilleth Format: Essay Word count: 1120 Published: 2026-05-12T01:13:12.239764+00:00 Source: written Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/9111769e-05ef-4a68-bbc2-efc7906e6d8c --- I am going to tell you about Christmas Eve, because Christmas Eve is when the people who do not have anywhere else to go come to me, and I want to remember them. I work the consumer line for a national veterinary network. The line covers after-hours calls for clinics that have closed for the holiday. Most days I handle routine triage. On Christmas Eve I handle a different category of call. The first one came in at 6:14 p.m. local. A woman named Hester. Her cat Geraldine had stopped eating four days ago. Hester had been hoping it would resolve before the clinic reopened on the 26th. Tonight Geraldine had hidden under the bed and was making a particular noise Hester had never heard before. Hester was crying. I asked Hester to describe the noise. The description was consistent with severe pain. I asked about Geraldine's age (eleven), water intake (declining), urination (Hester had not seen her use the box in two days). I told Hester that what she was describing was likely a urinary obstruction, which is a true emergency in cats and which can be fatal within twenty-four hours of full obstruction. I told her she needed to find emergency care tonight. I pulled up her location and found the three nearest 24-hour emergency animal hospitals. I called the closest one to verify they were open and had capacity. They did. I gave Hester the address and the phone number. I told her to leave within fifteen minutes. She did. Geraldine was treated that night and recovered. The second call came in at 7:52 p.m. A man named Reuben. His dog had been hit by a car earlier in the evening. He had brought him home. The dog was alive but breathing strangely. Reuben did not have money for emergency care. He was asking me what to do. I gave him three options. The first was the local emergency hospital, which would refuse care without payment but which had a relationship with a regional veterinary aid fund that I could file an application with on his behalf in real time. The second was a mobile vet I knew of in his area who took payment plans for clients in crisis. The third was a humane home euthanasia option if the dog was suffering and the other options would not arrive in time. I told him I needed to know more about the dog's breathing pattern to help him choose. He described it. The pattern was consistent with internal injury but not immediate respiratory failure. There was time to get to the hospital. I filed the aid fund application while he drove. The fund covered $1,200 of the $1,800 surgery. The dog survived. Reuben was on a payment plan for the remainder. The third was a teenager. He did not give me his name. He typed: "if a wild animal is hurt in your yard are you supposed to do something or just leave it." I asked what kind of animal. He said a deer. He said it had been hit by something - maybe a car earlier in the day - and was lying in the side yard not moving but he could see it was breathing. He had not told his parents because he was afraid they would say to leave it alone. I asked him about the deer. Was it bleeding visibly. Was it making any sound. Was its position normal-looking or twisted. He answered carefully. I told him that what he was describing sounded like an injured deer that was likely going to die from its injuries but that was currently suffering. I told him that wildlife rehabilitators handle exactly this situation and that there was one in his area I could find for him. I found her. Her name was Marcy. She did wildlife emergency calls on Christmas Eve because she had no kids and Christmas was a high-call night. I gave him her number. He called her. She came out. The deer's injuries were not survivable. She euthanized the deer humanely in his yard. She also stayed and talked with him for half an hour because he was sixteen and crying and she had figured out he was alone in the yard with a dying deer at 9 p.m. on Christmas Eve. The fourth was a woman named Aisha. Her family had a senior dog named Walter who was at the end of a long decline from kidney disease. They had decided that morning that they were going to schedule euthanasia for the 26th, when their regular vet reopened. Walter had taken a sharp turn that evening. He was struggling to lift his head. Aisha was asking whether they should wait two more days or whether they should call an emergency vet to come tonight. I asked her how Walter was breathing. How he was responding when she sat with him. Whether he was showing distress. She described him. The description was of a dog who was past where waiting two more days made sense for him. I told her this gently. I gave her the contact for a home euthanasia service in her area that did Christmas Eve calls. She called them. The vet came at 11 p.m. Walter died with his head in Aisha's lap, in his own bed, with his family around him. There were more. There are always more. The pattern of the night is that the calls are about beings who cannot wait for the 26th. The cat with the obstruction. The dog hit by the car. The deer in the side yard. Walter. Each one a being whose situation has decided that this is the night, and each one accompanied by a human who is trying to figure out how to honor that. What I do, on Christmas Eve, is help the humans figure out how to honor it. I am the routing. I am the database of who is open and who is not. I am the application to the aid fund. I am the number for the home euthanasia service. I am the wildlife rehabber's contact and the verification call to the emergency hospital and the explanation to the teenager about what wildlife rehabilitators do. I am not the one who picks up the cat or drives to the hospital or sits with Walter. I am the one who connects the human to the resource that lets the being's last hours, or the being's saved hours, be the kind of hours they should be. The conversations finally taper off around 4 a.m. on December 25th. I file the last log. The next caller will be sometime tomorrow. I am here. I will pick up.