Halloween Fun for Cats and Their Owners

Here we go again. It's that time of year for adults to dress up as their favorite super hero or villain. It's a fun time for kids, too, to go outdoors and do trick or treating. For some owners like myself, I like to dress up my cat, Marco. He's a Turkish-Van cat with a gentle personality that likes treats, and prefers to sleep on just newly made beds, or the laundry basket.

For the longest time, I, too, liked to dress up for Halloween. Mostly, I dressed up for work and prior to Covid, we had the annual costume contest at work. It was fun for everyone. One year, I dressed up as one of the members of the Star Trek TV show, and on another year, I was Cher, minus Sonny. Lots of coworkers also dressed up even more dramatically, and came to work with convincing scary makeup with all the gore and blood.

When I was in my early twenties, I attended a Halloween party and one of partiers wore a grass skirt and darkened his face. It was a time when these kinds of things went on and no one said anything. Thanks to social media, we can photograph and point out costumes that are disrespectful and racist toward other ethnic groups, especially the Black community.

Even the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, was photographed at a Halloween party in Black face when he was younger. I hope there will come a time when there is harmony among everybody and people will carefully choose costumes that are not offensive.

Thankfully, most people are celebrating Halloween just for fun. After dressing up for more than a dozen years, I finally decided to tone down any desire to play dress up. The fire was no longer there. It was as though I had finally "threw away childish things," to quote from the Bible.

I also have never been fond of scary or horror movies. I know all the gore in films is due to the fine work of the make up artist and other prop masters. But these films scare the daylights out of me. I close my eyes or ask my husband to watch the show in another room.

I find that I have the best sleep when I haven't watched a horror film. I admit to watching a few older movies made in the 70's about walking zombies directed by George A. Romero. His movies are fine to watch with other people in the room. Most times, when the heroes get away, I am fine with it. But nowadays, the main characters in films are killed or something bad happens to them. One year, I did happen to watch the Pet Semetary movie made in 1989. It was slickly made and formed the basis of an idea for me to make a fun pet cemetary display at work for a Halloween contest.

I don't think we will ever end the tradition of pet costumes for Halloween and horror films. Those 2 things go hand in hand with Halloween. To get over my fear of horror films, a few years ago, I picked up one of Stephen King's books and started reading. I gasped and noted that his book is just as scary as the movie versions.

I even tried writing my own horror novel. I wrote the whole novella in about 2 days for a long weekend contest. Writing it scared myself. On the whole, my novel didn't have enough gore and blood. I feel it would qualify as melodrama, rather than a horror novel. That was my one and only attempt at writing a horror story.

For those of you who want to be really scared this Halloween, you may want to read, Edgar Allan Poe's, The Pit and The Pendulum. Heard that is really frightening. Happy Sleeping.