Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

 My birthday is September 8th, 1987. I am 34 years old and technically a summer baby, though I would never refer to myself as such and will argue the fact that September means autumn until I die. I’m a Virgo in every sense of the term, overly analytical, reliant on a decent plan, and borderline hostile toward other people’s disorganization. As a child, my birthday had a tendency to fall right as the school year was starting, making it almost impossible to truly look forward to. All of these things have been true of me for my entire existence.  And yet, I feel like I wasn’t truly born until a different day: October 31st, 1991. This was the first year that I would truly experience Halloween. As a baby/toddler, my mother would usually stick me in a little costume, but we never did anything celebratory. I doubt I even understood what was going on then. But, when I turned four, I guess everyone decided I was the right age to start trick-or-treating. My Aunt Joanne gave me a pumpkin costume,

 I spend much of my life counting down the days until Halloween. And yet, when it comes as close as it is now, there’s a certain heaviness and sadness that comes with it, that makes me wish it would slow down, and that the season would last just a little bit longer. I don’t know if Halloween has ever really been about one specific day for me, even as a child. Yes, I always looked forward to the actual day of, to the point of once being told by my father to “stop wishing his weekend away” when it fell on a Sunday, but there was always more to it than that, even if I didn't have any specific plans leading up to Halloween itself. It was about the world being alive with autumn colors, the decorations on neighbors’ lawns and on long car rides. Just a general feeling in the air that wasn’t fully discernible during any other time of year. I tried to write a poem about it once. I don’t remember the specifics, and I don’t really know whether I should wish I still had the notebooks that cont

 So, you may or may not have noticed that my weekly tradition of reviewing American Horror Story episodes ended rather abruptly after the conclusion of Red Tide. If you’re wondering why, well...I just simply didn’t enjoy Death Valley enough to want to put my head back into each episode week after week. There are so many other things that need my time and creative energy in October, that spending significant amounts of time each week talking about something that I truly had no real interest in just sounded like a recipe for misery.  But, now that the storyline is over (Or is it? Hard to tell with a nonending but we’ll get to that later.) I would like to take a moment to express my thoughts. I am really not much of an alien fan. My father was always the sci-fi fanatic, not me, and perhaps years and years of it being background noise in my childhood home burnt me out on it. I don’t know. I went through that phase in the 90s like most other kids around my age at the time, when it was cool

 On October third, I stumbled across a very small pumpkin at work.  He was the type of pumpkin my mother would have encouraged me to choose when I was little, or so it seemed at first. My mother always thought anything that would eventually rot away was a waste of money, so my eagerness to purchase pumpkins was not her favorite aspect of my personality. She would point me toward the smaller, and thus less expensive ones. I distinctly remember finding one so tiny at a local farm one year, that the woman running the cash register went and got her manager and asked, “This is considered a pumpkin, right? Not a gourd?” (The really teeny pumpkins, most commonly called Jack Be Little nowadays, were generally referred to as gourds back then, at least around here, perhaps because they were in the same price range as the decorative gourds.) I can still hear her voice, perfectly, in my mind.  When I saw this little pumpkin at work, I was immediately transported back to that day, and the memory of

 I was inspired yet again today, by one of my 31 Shots of Halloween pictures on  Instagram , to share a fun Halloween memory from my childhood. Surely we all remember the Halloween Happy Meal pails that McDonald’s released in the late 80s/early-to-mid 90s, right?  Monster Creations  recently designed the bag on the right, and I had to get a picture of it with my authentic McDonald’s McBoo pail. It’s almost as if the little pails that were so iconic throughout so many of our childhoods, grew up with us. McDonald’s pails were among the first items in my little childhood Halloween collection. I believe my parents may have even had a few around from before I was born, or at the very least, before I was old enough to truly appreciate them. As I got a little older, they became some of my favorite “toys”, particularly McBoo here, and a witch that I named “Katta”. I played with them like any doll or stuffed animal, especially as Halloween neared.  One year, though, I can’t recall exactly when

 I just posted a photo for the 31 Shots of Halloween challenge that I’m participating in on  Instagram , and I felt inspired to share the story of what can only be described as the worst Halloween of my childhood. This picture was taken today in the rain, reminding me of the one and only rainy Halloween I ever endured in my childhood, when I was six years old. Halloween fell on a Sunday that year, and this was only going to be my third year of actually trick-or-treating. My mother, forever old-fashioned, questioned if Halloween should even be celebrated on a Sunday (Seriously, where did I come from?!), but, at least in the area that I grew up, it was.  I had picked out my costume at the beginning of the month, from the biggest Halloween store that seemed to exist at the time, Party City. I chose a Dalmatian, and I distinctly remember being put out that they didn’t have the actual, licensed 101 Dalmatians costume in my size. I had to settle for dressing up as a generic Dalmatian puppy,

 This year, the closer October has gotten, I have seen many memes going around similar to this one: I have a strange sense of humor at times and honestly, I have no idea if these are meant to be insulting to people like me or not, but, like many others in the spooky community, I choose to laugh at them. It can feel a bit cliche at times, being the “spooky friend”. When I was younger, I chose to hide my interests from the world. I was super shy and lived in constant fear of being judged, so I dressed to blend in, and named generic, popular things as my favorites (movies, music, etc.) when asked. It was a miserable, hollow existence and I’m very, very glad that I grew out of it. I find I actually get more compliments now than my younger self ever would have expected to. People can be mean, as they can with anything, but at the end of the day, nothing beats knowing who you are and what makes you happy, and feeling comfortable enough with yourself to express that. With that said, though, I