Dio de los Muertos Shrine

It's Dios de los Muertos.  Time to celebrate and remember our deceased loved ones.

That's the shrine I made for my deceased cats, Cringer, Monte, and Cecil.

I used battery powered candles so I could let them "burn" all day while I wasn't home.  I do have tea lights as well, which I may use tonight while I'm home to supervise.  I also wasn't sure if my new cats would be out and about in our house yet (we're doing some remodeling so our cats are sequestered in our bedroom) so I didn't want fire around their crazy selves.

Let's take a tour of the shrine (complete with bad photos!).

There's a familiar face.  It's skellie cat!  He's proud to be a part of the shrine (and glad the candles near him are battery powered).

A paper mache skull I painted.  Even thought it's a shrine for cats I still wanted some classic Day of the Dead stuff.

One of the urns containing my cats' ashes.  A cat nip toy (the sailor print item) and a flower.  The traditional flowers are marigolds but this time of year I couldn't hunt any down (and didn't have any growing in my yard) so I went with a mum.  I really like this mum and plan to plant it in my yard when I take down the shrine (or next season if it's too cold to plant it).  The little doll/statue next to the mum is a very cool doll I got in a swap and it just felt like it belonged with this shrine.  The same with the little fabric patch.  I love the Frieda Kahlo skeleton on that patch and it's a nod to creativity (which pets always inspire in me).

Close up of the boys' urn.  This urn contains the ashes of my two male cats, Monte and Cecil.  They were fond of each other in life, so we chose to put them together in one urn.  We also made sure to get a sturdy metal urn in case they fought with each other.  They would have destroyed a ceramic urn.

I don't have any good printed images of my cats, so I didn't include any photos in the shrine.

Monte and Cecil.

Monte was a neurotic cat who loved to lick off his own hair and loved to eat.  He had a great Siamese meow and crazy fu man chu whiskers.  He loved to snuggle under blankets and purr (we called him he cat-iator).

Cecil was also nutty in his own way.  He was the largest cat I have every had but had the tiniest meow (except when he was being bathed, then he made this crazy Chewbaca noise that cracked us up).  He didn't like much in the way of "people food" but he did like Iron City beer (we only gave him a drop now and again).

The urn for our female cat, Cringer.  She never was very fond of the boys so it was a no-brainer that she would get her own urn.  A very elegant one at that.  This is a stoneware type urn.  Not ceramic.  I'm too paranoid I'd break a ceramic urn.  Cringer's urn also gets its own cat nip toy featuring a female skeleton selling flowers.

Cringer.  She loved to give the stink eye.  She had a crabby streak but was also super loving and nutty.  Being the oldest of the clan (and first) she was never much of a fan of the male cats.  She was a sweet little low-rider tortie with a thumb print sized spot on her head that made me call her Dinty Moore.

While these three are gone, they will NEVER be forgotten.