What to Write in a National Cat Day Card When the Cat Can't Read It

The cat can't read it, so decide who it is for

Every cat card is read by a person. Sometimes it is read aloud to the cat, in the kitchen, in a perfectly serious voice. Sometimes it is read silently by the owner and then photographed for the group chat. Sometimes it is pinned up at a shelter by the staff it was sent to thank. In every case the cat does none of the reading and all of the causing, and the writer's job is to write for whoever is actually holding the card.

I learned the limits of the other approach in October 2023. A friend, Anouk, had moved that spring to Bisbee, Arizona, and taken her cat Pickle with her. For National Cat Day I wrote a card as Pickle: a full-page inspection report on the new house, eleven findings, each with its own joke. Anouk wrote back that she had read it aloud in the kitchen, as is the protocol in that house, and that Pickle had left the room at finding four. The audience had walked out mid-performance. The card I sent the next year was four lines long, and it was read to the end:

Inspection of the new house, final report. The sunny room is approved, and it is mine. The suitcases are noted and remain under review. The laundry basket has been claimed, as of the week the weather turned. Everything else may continue. Pickle.

The rule underneath: write short enough to survive being read aloud to a cat, and specific enough to be worth keeping by the human. There is a second test, quieter than the read-aloud: the photograph. Cat Day cards get photographed, usually with the cat in the frame ignoring the card completely, and sent to the people who were not there. So write lines that still make sense to a stranger seeing them once, at phone size, under a photograph of a cat looking elsewhere. A line that needs the whole friendship to decode it will not travel; a line with one true thing in it travels fine. Four kinds of line fail both tests every time, whatever voice you write in:

Happy Cat Day to our crazy cat lady!
You are basically staff now. The cat owns you.
Nine lives, and she is spending this one asleep.
Dogs are loyal, but your cat is cute too, I suppose.

The first makes the person the joke, the second makes ownership the joke, the third makes death the joke, and the fourth is not about this cat at all. If a line could be sent unchanged to any cat owner in the country, it was written for nobody.

To the person, about the cat: the default voice

Most Cat Day cards should be this: a note to the human, with the cat as its subject. It is the safest voice and the one that keeps best, because it can say the thing the other voices cannot: what the cat has done for the person's year. The person is the one who feeds, warms, photographs and worries, and a card that notices that work lands differently from one that only admires the cat. Keep the cat specific and aim the compliment at the human.

• To the staff of one: happy National Cat Day. The feeding schedule runs the house now, and the work is excellent.
• Thinking of you and the small supervisor who inspects every bag that comes through the door.
• You swore you were not a cat person. The cat asleep on your feet has filed a formal disagreement.
• Thank you for the photographs all year, and happy Cat Day. The laundry basket one got forwarded twice.
• May your cat allow you the good chair today, as a treat. She will not. The wish stands anyway.
• To the human who warms the towel, opens the door in both directions, and apologises to the furniture: the cat knows the work you do.
• Another year of being chosen, daily, by an animal who chooses nothing lightly. Happy Cat Day.

To the cat, in a straight voice

Writing to the cat directly works if you keep your own voice and refuse the baby talk. These cards get read aloud, usually by the owner, often in the kitchen, and the pleasure of them is the contrast: formal address, feline indifference. Write as you would to a person with strong boundaries and no interest in your feelings, keep it short, and let the cat's year supply the content. The moment the card starts meowing in print, it has become about the writer.

• Happy Cat Day. You were right about the box; it was better than the bed that came in it.
• Thank you for the year. The mornings are yours, the evenings are shared, and the laundry basket ruling stands.
• Happy Cat Day, [Name]. One year in this house and you have already rearranged it correctly.
• This card will be read aloud to you at a level volume. You may leave at any point, as usual.
• To the cat who greets every guest, inspects every bag, and files one report per shoe: happy Cat Day.
• The new scratching post arrived without comment on the old one. Consider it an apology for the old one.

As the cat: verdicts, reports and rulings

The cat's own voice is the hardest to hold and the easiest to overshoot, as my eleven-finding report proved. What survives the read-aloud is the verdict form: short findings, plainly stated, on subjects a cat is qualified to judge: rooms, rugs, food, luggage, staff. A cat in a card should never be sentimental and never explain itself. One joke, stated as fact, and stop while the audience is still in the room.

• Inspection complete. The house is acceptable. The human is retained for another year.
• I have reviewed the new rug. It passes. I will sit on the exact centre of it daily.
• Report from the laundry basket: warm, private, correctly located. No changes requested.
• The suitcases have been noted. Departures will be tolerated. Returns will be supervised from the hall.
• I allowed one photograph. Do not make a calendar.
• Verdict on the year: food on time, sun in the right rooms, staff attentive. Approved.

When the cat is someone you know from photographs

Plenty of Cat Day cards go to cats the writer has never met: the coworker's cat with a standing role in video calls, the friend's cat who exists for you as a feed of photographs. You cannot borrow the owner's evidence, so gather your own: one photograph you actually remember, one story you were told and can retell in a clause, one appearance at the edge of a screen. And if you have none of those, change the subject and write about the owner's year of being staff, which you do know. A card built on a borrowed anecdote told slightly wrong is worse than a card about the ears at the edge of the call. There is a legitimate way to get better evidence: ask. One question to the owner in the weeks before the day, along the lines of what is she doing these days, returns a story every time, because owners keep a current one ready the way other people keep a photograph of their children ready. Use the story they give you, in their proportions, and the card sounds like it was written by someone who knows the house, which, at one remove, it was. For the coworker version, the group card is often the better vehicle anyway: group cards are how workplaces mark the small occasions well, and a famous office cat is exactly that size of occasion.

• Everything I know about [Name] comes from your photographs, and the photographs suggest she runs a tight ship. Happy Cat Day to you both.
• I have never met your cat, but I have heard the bookshelf story twice and would happily hear it again.
• Your cat features in more of our conversations than some of my relatives. That seems correct.
• The video of her missing the jump and styling it out is still on my phone. Happy National Cat Day.
• I know your cat mostly as a pair of ears at the edge of video calls. They are excellent ears.
• Your cat's fan club includes people who have never been in the same room as her. I am one of them.

The first Cat Day in a new home

A cat in its first year somewhere is still auditing the arrangement, and the card should match: hopeful, plain, light on the forever language. What the first year actually contains is a series of small annexations: one room claimed, one basket chosen, one human selected for the mornings. Name those and the card writes itself. Save the epic tenure lines for a cat who has earned them.

• First Cat Day in the new house: a windowsill claimed, a schedule set, opinions issued about both. That counts as settled.
• The cat has chosen the laundry basket, the good chair is under negotiation, and everything is proceeding normally.
• For their first Cat Day together: may this be the year she stops checking the door she came in by.
• A year ago she was a photograph on a shelter page. Now there is a cushion with her name said over it every morning.
• She slept through the whole upheaval of moving week and woke up owning the place. Correct outcome.

For the cat who has run the house for years

At the other end sits the cat of eight, ten, fifteen years, and the register changes completely. Chaos jokes stop fitting; what fits is tenure. The routines the household now runs on were set by this cat, one ruling at a time, and everyone has forgotten there was ever another arrangement. Write like an annual report from a grateful board: brief, respectful, and aware that senior management reads slowly and misses nothing.

• To the senior management, happy National Cat Day. Ten years of service, no retirement planned, the household is grateful.
• To the cat who has outlasted three sofas and one house move: the routines hold because you hold them.
• The kitten is somehow twelve. The rules she set as a kitten are still enforced as law around here.
• Slower mornings, same authority. Happy Cat Day, old friend.
• At this point nobody remembers whose house it was first. It was hers. It was always hers.

The day was founded for the cats still waiting

National Cat Day has a purpose under the celebration. Colleen Paige founded it in 2005, with early backing from the ASPCA, to get cats out of shelters and into homes; October 29 was the anniversary of the day her own family adopted their first cat. So one legitimate job for a Cat Day card is the day's original work: thank the shelter whose photograph changed your year, update the fosterer who handed over a kitten in March, write to the people doing the unglamorous shifts. Keep it factual and short and it carries the purpose without preaching. Shelter staff read these cards at the end of long days, and the part that gets passed around the staff room is never the thanks; it is the update. The cat who was frightened of the food bowl now sleeps in a laundry basket. The kitten from the March litter is enormous. Write the update first and let the thanks ride on it: a thank-you ecard that lands on the day is the traditional form of it.

• Thank you, and happy Cat Day. The cat asleep on our sofa started the year as a paragraph in your shelter notes. She is doing well. So are we.
• The kitten from the March litter says hello. She is enormous now, and the chair is hers.
• For the fostering years, the 2 a.m. feeds and the handovers you make look easy: thank you, and happy National Cat Day.
• We adopted her on a Tuesday because of a photograph your team posted. Cat Day seemed the right day to say it worked out.
• To the people who do the unglamorous parts: the litter rotas, the vet runs, the honest write-ups of difficult cats. Thank you.

Short lines and gift tags

Some Cat Day cards travel attached to things: a tin of the good food, a toy, a donation receipt. Those cards get read in the seconds before the cat inspects the actual gift and finds it acceptable or beneath notice, so give them three lines at most: one true thing, one greeting, done. The tag is also the right home for the shortest forms of the other voices, trimmed down to a single ruling that can be read at a glance and kept without effort.

• From the staff, with respect, on her day.
• For the cat: one tin, as tribute.
• She knows.
• Read aloud, please.
• The house runs on her schedule, as it should.
• One true thing: the laundry basket is hers now.
• Approved by the cat, probably.

Turn it into a group card

A cat known by a whole office, street or family chat deserves the group version, and the mechanics matter more than the sentiments. Give every signer the same assignment: one line, about this cat, something you have actually seen it do, in a photograph or on a screen or in the room. Lines about cats in general are returned for revision. The organiser's real job is collecting one true detail per person, including from the people who have only ever met the cat as ears at the edge of a call. Order the signatures so the owner's favourite story lands last, attach the best photograph anyone has, and the card becomes the year's record of the cat, which is precisely the part the owner keeps.

Send it so it lands on the day. A Cat Day card arriving on October 30 reads as an apology, and the fixed date is the one kindness this occasion offers a writer: no lunar tables, no movable feasts, just the 29th, every year, in the diary since January. The same keeper rule decides the other cards worth getting right, from what to write in a Mother's Day card to the occasions gathered in virtual celebrations: write for the reader, name the true thing, stop early. For the cat version, start a group card with room for every signer, or write the solo card and create a card online in the minutes before October 29 gets away from you. Then go and read it aloud. Slowly, at a level volume, to an audience that is free to leave at finding four.

There is a framed print of a tabby in the writer's bathroom, bought for two dollars at a church jumble sale in 2021, of a cat nobody in the house has ever met or identified. The frame cracked at one corner in a fall in 2023 and the print has sat slightly sideways ever since. Guests keep giving the cat names; the name currently holding is His Honour. Nobody sends it a card. It remains, by some distance, the most admired cat in the house.