Hello, humans! I have to warn you, I’ve got a lot to meow about this month so I hope all you humans have got a bit of spare time to listen to my list of fully justifiable complaints. (Mum says you’re going to read my meows rather than listen to them, but I’ve got no idea what she means by that so I just ignore her. Sometimes humans make no sense to us cats whatsoever.)
Here’s an example of you two-legged creatures making no sense: bringing trees indoors and hanging sparkly things on them, and then telling us to leave them alone. It’s happened before. Maddie and I recognise the signs now: the hours of daylight get shorter and shorter, it gets colder and colder in our outside territory, and then, sure enough, in comes the tree, on go the sparkly hanging things, and we get shooed away from it. It’s a mystery to us.
And not only that, but at this Christmas time, as they call it, there were other undesirable goings-on too. For a start, the extra humans came to the house. We don’t mind that, we like the extra humans (family, as they’re called). Admittedly Maddie’s a bit nervous around males, but we both like the female ones who stay in our house, and we like human kittens coming to visit, too.
What we don’t like is, when extra humans stay overnight, ‘our’ sofa – the one we like to snuggle down on, with our blankets, during the chilly evenings – gets turned into a bed, and the door of that room gets closed so we can’t go in there. And all the comfy seats in the lounge are being sat on by humans so we have to lie in our cat-beds on the floor. It’s so undignified! I mean, come on, we live here! Surely extra humans who only stay for a night or two should be put to sleep on the floor – not us.
This year, to make things even worse, on the special day they call Christmas, the whole lot of them went out for the day to see more family, leaving us alone with a new type of food dish with a lid, that only opens up to show us our dinner when it wants to – not when we want it to! That dish was very lucky we didn’t break its silly lid, I can tell you. I gave it a good meowing-to, but it wouldn’t open up until I’d gone off to sulk in another room. Then I fell asleep, so I didn’t even notice it was finally open until the humans all eventually came home, after dark, when I was starving hungry.
They seemed to think that giving us a new tin of cat-treats (wrapped up in paper for some reason) and some toy mice with long tails – which we quite like, to be fair – would make up for this abandonment. We always know when they’re going off and leaving us like that, because they spray all our toys with catnip before they go. ‘That’ll keep you amused’, they say – and well, it’s hard to disagree because obviously we do love catnip. But there’s only so long you can spend rolling around over toy mice purring in ecstasy before the catnip smell wears off.
But the worst thing that happened was: on the day after all this, the day they call Boxing Day even though nothing happens with any boxes, some more Family came to the house, bringing a D.O.G. with them. Sorry, I don’t want to use bad language but I’m sure you know which ‘D’ word I mean. We had already experienced a D.O.G. recently, because new humans have arrived in the house next to ours. Mum and Dad used to say the house had been empty for a long time, so we took over their outdoor territory as part of our own. And now, to our disgust, we have to watch our backs every time we venture into that area, as we have seen this D.O.G. pulling faces at us, and heard it swearing at us through the glass door.
So it was really adding insult to injury, letting Family people bring this D.O.G. into our own house! Maddie and I nearly died of shock. They said it’s only a puppy: that’s apparently what D.O.G. kittens are called.
(Warning: the D.O.G. is in the next picture, with one of the Human Family, but I told Mum to only show you a small picture so that it doesn't frighten everyone).
They were all stroking this creature, and cuddling it, ignoring the fact that by its very nature it was bound to be a cat-hater. (It’s no good Mum and Dad going on about the D.O.G. they had years ago who let our predecessor-cats snuggle down in bed with it. We think that’s just an old family legend. We don’t believe a word of it). We spent a lot of that day outside, but the most peculiar thing was that when we did venture back in, Mum and Dad decided to feel sorry for us and allowed us to go and sleep on their bed ! Well! I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it was worth having a You-Know-What in the house, just to get a special one-day bedroom pass, but it did compensate a little bit for our stress and inconvenience.
To be honest we won’t mind at all when the Christmas tree decides to stop flashing its lights and take itself back outside, where it belongs. That always seems to be the sign that things can go back to normal – just the way we like it!
We hope all you humans out there are being considerate of your poor cats during this strange time of year!
Love from Monty and Maddie.