Imagine this:

The house is warm, smelling of baking sugar cookies and cinnamon. A fire crackles in the fireplace and the Christmas lights on the tree emit a soft glow. The dogs are snuggled on the couch in tightly wound warm balls, jerking a paw or a leg as they are lost in their dreams. Favorite music is playing as my son and I sprinkle the last glistening of colored sugar on the perfectly thin cookies, still cooling on their pan.

This is how I imagined it to be.
Instead, the evening went something like this:

My son grabbed a chair and promptly pushed it into the counter where I was pouring the powdered cookie mix into the bowl, spilling it everywhere. As I was busy cleaning the sticky mess of egg from his hands, the dogs grabbed a piss diaper from the trash and began fighting over it, spilling the tiny beads that soak up the piss inside the diaper onto the rug. While I turned to peel the last vestiges of diaper off of the tongue of one of the dogs, I smelled something. My son had put two stone coasters into the toaster, and said that he was trying to make toast. The other dog jumped on the counter behind me, and my son kicked the chair out from under him and he was hanging precariously from the counter. I put the chair back under his legs, and noticed that a dog was shredding a Christmas ornament. I picked it up and the boy was reaching for the block of knives. The timer went off. The cookies were pale, ugly blobs. Where they done? Who knew? I took them out and placed them back on the counter as far as I could, and set up some huge snappy-traps around them that were supposed to keep dogs away. I took the boy up to wrap gifts. Somehow he got a wallpaper scraper (where the hell did that come from?) and began beating it against the wall, singing Frosty the Snowman. At that point, I grabbed him and ran downstairs: one dog had set off the snappy-trap in an attempt to get at the cookies, and the other was standing on two legs, scraping at the back door to go out. I opened the door and the dog ran out and I saw her take a cylinder of frozen dog shit in her mouth like some foul cigar.