The Christmas Eve My Puppy Ate Tinsel

We got our puppy Cooper in October, which meant this was his first Christmas, and we did what every excited new puppy owner does — decorated the entire house without thinking through what any of it looked like from a curious ten-month-old lab's perspective.

Tinsel, specifically, looks like the greatest toy ever invented if you're a puppy. We caught him mid-swallow, a good foot of silvery tinsel already gone, more still hanging out of his mouth that we managed to gently pull free before he got that part down too.

Linear foreign objects — string, tinsel, ribbon, that kind of thing — are apparently one of the more dangerous categories of things a dog can swallow, more so than a solid object in some ways, because of how they can cause a specific kind of intestinal damage as the body tries to move them through. I did not know this on Christmas Eve. I know it very well now.

We called the Waggle vet line immediately, on Christmas Eve, fully expecting maybe a recorded message or a long wait given the holiday. Got connected within a few minutes instead. The vet asked exactly how much we'd seen him swallow, whether we'd managed to pull any back out, and whether he'd shown any gagging or distress during or after. Because of the amount involved and the fact that it was tinsel specifically rather than plain string, she was clear this needed to be seen in person that night, not monitored at home — she explained the linear object risk in a way that made the urgency make sense rather than just telling us to panic.

She helped us locate an emergency vet that was open on Christmas Eve, which took some doing, and gave us a summary to relay when we got there so we weren't starting from zero with an on-call vet meeting Cooper for the first time. He ended up needing an x-ray to confirm how much was still in his system and, thankfully, passed the rest naturally over the next two days with monitoring rather than needing surgery.

Every Christmas since, our tree has been tinsel-free and anything hanging low enough for a curious dog gets swapped for ornaments we're less worried about. Cooper, now three, still eyes the tree with the same look of intent every December, so the vigilance has never really stopped.

If your holiday scare was more about food than decorations, chocolate is the classic one worth knowing the real risk on. And general foreign object swallowing situations are worth understanding before your dog decides your decorations look edible too.