Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

 I promise I’ll post something less melancholy one of these days, but post-Halloween depression and the end of the autumn season bring about the more solemn memories of spooky seasons gone by. I’m not sure when I first really started recognizing my post-Halloween depression and acknowledging how it affected me. I think it was somewhere in my pre-teen years, probably around middle school age. However, there was always some part of me fighting to keep Halloween alive in the off-season. I truly have no idea why I never kept decorations up year round in my bedroom when I was younger. It wasn’t until my early twenties that I even considered this an option. I don’t think anyone would’ve taken issue with me keeping some plastic pumpkins on display in my own space all year round, especially considering that at some point, as a toddler, I’d gotten so strangely attached to an Easter lamb window cling, that my mother allowed me to keep it in my bedroom window until it dried out too much to st...

 I have never been a fan of Thanksgiving. As a child, I thought of it as “that boring holiday between Halloween and Christmas”, and found it insulting somehow that such a boring holiday would dare to follow Halloween.  The false history related to the holiday has made me dislike it even more as I’ve gotten older, along with the more trivial, but beyond exhausting, issues that come with being a retail worker this time of year. I can’t find a single thing to like about the holiday itself, and yet I realize there’s a part of me that clings to it. Thanksgiving is autumn’s underwhelming, not-so-grand finale. I think of it a lot like the firework show I went to when I was twelve. Somehow, someone screwed up and the finale came at the beginning. The entire show was backwards. Rapid flashes of color lit up the sky, exciting everyone for what was to come, but instead of the pace picking up even more, things slowed down, until the show came to an end with one meek little white flash. Th...

 I feel a strange energy in the air today.  I had planned to take a lot of pictures, even hauled six real pumpkins outside with me, and of course, it started to rain. Not too heavily, but enough to make me wary of having handmade dolls outside for an extended period of time. I finished up what I could, but I found myself still longing to be outside.  That’s a strange occurrence for me, in November. I do try, sometimes desperately, to hold onto the fact that November is still autumn, but it’s not always easy, especially in a day and age where Christmas takes over on November first, and autumnal decor for Thanksgiving doesn’t seem to exist anymore. (Does anyone remember when grocery stores would stock pumpkins until Black Friday?) Today, however, has been a different kind of day. It’s hard to explain, but after pulling a chair under one of the umbrellas on the patio, I looked around and just felt the strangest feelings and energies. The sky is gray, and there’s a melan...

 Last night, I had a very vivid vision. I’m honestly not sure if it was a dream or a memory.  I just know that for a short, sweet moment in time, I was transported back to my childhood Halloweens.  I wanted to attempt to share the memory through writing. You pour the candy you received on your small tour through the neighborhood with your mother, into the bag your costume came in. You think about leaving it in your smaller pail, but there’s no telling where the night may go. You don’t want to have to quit early because you ran out of room!  Your aunt is taking you out tonight, and, at this moment in time, she’s the only person in the world that you can possibly imagine loving Halloween as much as you do. She got you into this holiday, coaxing you out from under a table when you were four years old, dressed as a pumpkin but scared to trick or treat. From then on, Halloween was always somewhere in your thoughts. You bundled up in winter, wishing you were putting on a c...

 One thing I’m pretty proud of when it comes to this blog, is that it hasn’t just become a collection of hauls. I tried Halloween blogging several years ago (on LiveJournal...) and never felt like I had much to talk about if I wasn’t showing off something I’d recently bought. It actually got to the point where I think I may have been buying things just for the sake of having something to talk about on that blog. That was something I promised myself wasn’t going to happen again, once I had the idea to make a new blog. However, sometimes there are things that you get that you just have to talk about! When I was working on my post about  my childhood belief in the Great Pumpkin , I ran across a decoration I’d never seen before, the  Telco Motionettes Pumpkin Ghost ! This guy literally was the epitome of my childhood vision of the Great Pumpkin, and he instantly became a grail item for me! I took one look at him and suddenly I was the child who couldn’t sleep the night before...

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Some are happy about it, but others aren’t.  Such is life, with everything. There will always be people with opposing views, on just about any subject. But Christmas in the Halloween community tends to be a controversial one.  Are you a “poser” for enjoying and posting about Christmas, when you claim your favorite holiday is Halloween? Or are you a grinch for not caring to get into the spirit of a different holiday? The answer is, of course, no, to both. Everyone has the right to do, or not do, what makes them happy as an individual. There’s no ironclad rule that you can’t enjoy more than one holiday, and there’s no ironclad rule that you have to force yourself into the spirit of a holiday that doesn’t mean all that much to you.  But I’ve seen a fair amount of hate regarding this issue, on both sides, so I figured I’d talk about where I stand, and what I think. I am, personally, not a huge fan of Christmas. I wouldn’t say I hat...

 Hard to believe, it’s already been a week since Halloween Eve. I truly don’t know where the time goes. Only one short week ago, we were anticipating the magic of Halloween night, and now, we’re staring down another 359 days on the countdown.  But, I figured today might be a good day to recap my trip to Sleepy Hollow for Halloween 2020. We left on Thursday, the 29th. It was the perfect weather for a little spooky road trip. I’ve come to appreciate gloomy, rainy days as Halloween approaches. I don’t want to see it so rainy or stormy that Halloween night events get cancelled, but that ominous feeling a few days leading up to the holiday definitely helps get you into the mood. We had no events planned for Thursday night, and thankfully so, as they likely would’ve been cancelled, but it was still just an amazing feeling to be in such an amazing place on a day that felt so spooky. There is a grocery store right by the hotel that always has vintage style decorations for sale, and of...

  You’ve always dreamt of a place where you could feel like yourself all year round. You’ve watched movies about towns of eternal Halloween, and they enchant you, but it’s not very realistic, is it? Is there anywhere in the world where the light doesn’t go out on November first? You’ve resigned yourself to the fact that this world is only truly your home during the month of October. You say it makes you ‘like a pumpkin’, rotting away and dying in November, only to be born again, bursting off your vine at the first signs of Halloween the following year. It’s a strange existence, and you sometimes feel alone in it, but you know it is what you need. But then you find a place. From the second you enter this little town, you can feel someone, or something, calling you. You wonder if it’s an entity of some kind, but start to realize it sounds more and more like yourself...a higher piece of your being that wants you to take this all in.  Stay here, it tells you, and you may never hav...

 The day after Halloween has always been the most difficult day of the year for me.  Over time, it’s gotten harder, as the rush to begin the Christmas season begins earlier and earlier with each passing year. The fact that autumn still has almost two months left in it, is entirely forgotten.   But, even as a wide-eyed child who did enjoy and look forward to Christmas each year, November, and specifically the first, was still a desolate time. Obviously, in my adult years, I’ve built my life around making every day feel like Halloween in some capacity. It truly helps, but it doesn’t change the metamorphosis that the world seems to undergo the second the clock strikes midnight on November first. (Art by Ally Burke, @funnyskullgrin on Instagram) There is a feeling that something has been extinguished. The aura of magic that seemed to surround everything just a few short hours before has evaporated somehow. That feeling of “anything can happen”, that spooky excitement tha...