As holidays and observances come up throughout the year we find ourselves in the newsroom covering the same topics from year to year.
This isn’t a bad thing, mostly. Everyone wants to know when the downtown Duncan Spooktacular is, for example, and when they can ride the Halloween Train at the BC Forest Discovery Centre. We would be remiss if we didn’t include information about these perennial community favourites in our publication.
There are also the usual warnings about keeping kids safe on the big night by choosing appropriate costumes (make sure they can see) and making sure they can be seen when they’re out on the streets of our neighbourhoods. It never hurts to remind people of this sort of thing.
The other big one that always hits home for me is about fireworks.
It’s not as bad as it once was; five years ago it seemed as if everyone and their dog felt the need to set off these things for weeks surrounding Oct. 31. But there’s still plenty of banging going on out there as we come up to Halloween. It invariably makes me cringe.
About three years ago now, my cat went missing two weeks before Halloween. Kids had been setting off fireworks almost constantly in the back lanes of the community, and I’m convinced my cat became terrified and made a run for it. I was extremely fortunate; just after Christmas (I had put out the word to every animal organization and person I could thing of) I got a call from the SPCA letting me know that a cat matching the description of mine was living under a kind gentleman’s porch in a community kilometres away. How he got all that way is a mystery, but I was thrilled when I headed to the man’s house and found out that indeed, my little guy was there. He came out from under the man’s deck meowing like crazy in greeting.
The first time there were fireworks set off after that he ran and hid under the bed, trembling. He had never done that before.
While my story has a happy ending, far too often that’s not the case when it comes to animals scared by fireworks. So I ask you to think about that when deciding if you’re going to buy them and clandestinely set them off.
Pet and other animal owners and lovers will thank you if you reconsider and choose instead to head to the community sanctioned fireworks displays.
At least those have advertized times that we can plan for.