2011 has certainly been an educational year for this puppy procuring parental unit, that’s for sure!

And if there’s one thing that my wife and I learned about our loony, yet lovable little terror on four paws, it’s simply that if sniff comes to smell, she can and will not hesitate to consume pretty much anything that she can get her greedy, little jaws around!  It’s a wonder you’re even reading this column here today … not that there’s necessarily any worry about her eating the entire Internet, mind you, but my computer, my desk, the very chair that I sit in as I pen this literary levity for your weekly enjoyment – those are all most certainly fair game for supplemental nutrition as far as Cleo the Wonder Pup is concerned…

Which leads us to this week’s dilemma because with Christmas rapidly approaching, I know that we have to come up with something for the newest little member of our clan to find under the tree, but what exactly do you get the puppy who would just as soon eat the tree itself if I hadn’t taken the necessary precautions to erect a special puppy-proof barrier around its base to keep her malicious mouth precariously at bay?!  Over the last couple of months, we’ve caught her munching on countless pairs of shoes, decorative pillows from the couch, and even parts of our bedroom wall – honestly, it’s been just about all we could do this holiday season to prevent her from eating Christmas altogether, much less think of anything that we’d voluntarily offer up to the fate of her mighty incisors and their well-documented reign of terror!

Pretty much anything “stuffed” is automatically out, on account of countless doggy toys whose innards have already been extracted brutally and without remorse in the arena that is our living room.  Chew toys are much in the same, because unlike some dogs who are more what you might consider “amused” by the magical squeakers buried within, instead I think Cleo sees them more as a challenge, taunting her bitterly with each squawk emitted from inside their fortresses of fabric or rubber.  A new bed?  Ha!  Do I even need to tell you what happened to the last two beds?!

But the more I think about it, you know, maybe it’s my approach itself that’s fundamentally flawed, considering that finding a gift that this puppy won’t eat is pretty much akin to finding a fresh snow outside my doorstep here in sunny Florida on Christmas morning!  Instead of going out of my way to find some indestructible, puppy-proof prize that likely by the laws of nature doesn’t actually even exist, perhaps the real key to finding the perfect gift for the puppy who eats everything is in giving her something that she can eat for days and days and days to her little heart’s content…

…something that has universal pooch appeal for dogs big and small…

…something so big that she won’t even be able to carry it around the house with her until she gets at least a week or two into it!

And besides, I suppose if in the worst case scenario by some bizarre turn of events Cleo doesn’t end up absolutely loving the comedically large, three-foot candy cane-shaped bone that that she’ll be discovering underneath the tree first thing on Christmas morning, as a fallback she can always just eat the equally-comedic gigantic box that it came in– she is still just a baby, you know…