By Tammy Scileppi
It’s “The Twelve Days of Christmas” with a purr-fectly irresistible twist.
In her award-winning, lovingly illustrated tale, “The Twelve Cats of Christmas,” Queens-based cat worshiper, Jane Sayre Denny has jazzed up the famous traditional song with a whole new, all-feline cast of furry characters: from a Persian in a pear tree through eight Manx a-milking and finally to 12 cats drumming on the last day.
What cat lover, younger or older can resist a holiday story wherein on each of the 12 days before Christmas, “my true love gave to me…” some wild animal or unruly mob of kitties?
Denny seems to have a karmic connection with the cat kingdom but insists she has never gone out looking for a cat to adopt.
“They always found me,” she said. “Either they followed me home or were standing on the doorstep when I got there.”
One cat, Basil, actually walked into her Manhattan office window. Another, Jack, was left by his mother on her back step when he was less than an hour old.
So does that make her a crazy cat lady?
“I am not that woman, even if every cat in Queens says I am. I’m definitely not that crazy cat woman, running around with cases of food and traps, driving miles every day to feed colonies of feral cats,” said Denny. “Absolutely not! My mother was the one feeding every cat in Queens to the point that her yard had more cats than acorns.”
Denny said her mom wasn’t that woman either, but she inherited an assortment of hungry cats when the block’s original crazy cat lady, a few doors down, 90-year-old Mrs. Lipkin – who had been feeding feral cats for years, but not spaying or neutering them – died.
“All the Lipkin cats then moved into my mother’s yard,” said Denny. “I got the benefit of seeing their adorable faces when I visited, and the occasional cartoon idea, but they weren’t my cats…my life…my onus. I had two cats, see. The end. Just enough to drain my pocketbook…just too much for my asthma. Just enough.”
After her mother passed away Denny got the house. She now has five insulated shelters that keep her yard cats warm in the winter, and they eat twice a day. She even makes sure they get medical attention if they need it. She said the official cat count is now about 10 or 12, down from 18.
So what was her inspiration for the book?
“As a graphic designer, I try to do a custom Christmas card every year. I usually wait too late in the year to start, and then have to rush. I hadn’t even thought of what I would do until they were already playing Christmas songs on the radio,” Denny recalled. “‘Twelve Days of Christmas’ was playing in the background when one of my cats leapt on the desk and swept all my papers off onto the floor. ‘Wrecking ball!’ I said to him. You could throw a partridge out of a pear tree! Eureka! I saw the card – a cat in the pear tree where the partridge had been, feathers flying from the poor bird that had been run out of his tree.”
Then Eureka No. 2 – Denny knew it had to be a whole series. This song had to be completely rewritten, and illustrated, with cats!
Of course, creating a 12-card set wouldn’t be cheap, and Denny said she couldn’t spring for a 1,000-plus run of Christmas cards that would probably sit in boxes in the corner. So, the idea seemed out of reach. But within two days, her artist friend Bernadette Kazmarski (“a fantastic painter of cats”), had emailed her, “out of the blue – asking me what my experience with Zazzle.com had been like. I had no idea what she was talking about; I had never heard of that,” Denny recalled. Zazzle.com is an on-demand printing service that will print singles of any design you create on any item, including cards, and make them available to the public.
Well, it turned out Bernadette had mixed her up with someone else that had mentioned Zazzle to her, and the mix-up gave Denny Eureka No. 3 – she was able to do all 12 designs in two weeks, and by Dec. 1, “The Twelve Cats of Christmas” was a complete set, available not just to Denny as her Christmas card for however few copies she wanted, but to the world.
“A few months later, one of my clients who hired me to illustrate her children’s book (‘Obi Nwokolo – The Power Kid series’) was publishing on Amazon’s self-publishing platform, CreateSpace.” Denny said she had to learn the specs for that, and with that came Eureka No. 4 – “The Twelve Cats of Christmas” had to be a book.
The perpetual cat lover thinks that replacing each day’s gift in ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’ with cats “is a vast improvement over the cacophony of noisy birds and mayhem in the song. I mean, if he was really my true love, shouldn’t he have sent cats? And, of course, cats do things their own way, so the festivities may not be what you expect.”
The series www.amazon.com is a holiday must-have… and must-give. It won the International Cat Writers’ Association 2012 Certificate of Excellence, Muse Medallion, and the Kuykendall Image Award for outstanding image series featuring cats.
A portion of every sale goes to help homeless and rescued cats in Queens.
