Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

 Yesterday, a very rare thing happened to me. I got to have a snow day. If you’re what society considers to be an adult, you probably know what a rare occurrence this. Yesterday morning, as I got ready for work, I scrolled through Instagram a bit and envied anyone who was sharing spooky, snowy photos. Then, as luck would have it, the town decided not to so much as sprinkle a grain of salt onto my street until well after 1PM, so going to work was out of the question. I spent the day trying to nurture myself creatively, which honestly has not been the easiest thing to do lately, and managed to take some pictures I am very happy with.  While I prefer the backdrop of autumn, by far, sometimes I feel like I really don’t give winter the credit that it deserves. In autumn, everything is dying, but in winter, everything is already dead. It’s a strange thing to try to explain, but have you ever gone outside during a snowstorm, and just listened? The silence that blankets the air is so ...

 Since my previous post was about my past life of scaredy-cat-ness, I was recently reminded of another story that makes my now-spooky self cringe with embarrassment, but it’s also so silly that I thought it would be fun to share. Now, as an adult, I’ve come to know and appreciate the many different themes and aesthetics of Halloween/spooky decor. As I think I’ve mentioned before, I consider my personal aesthetic to be something along the lines of, “Vintage Halloween Party Meets Haunted Pumpkin Patch”. Very heavy on the orange, pumpkins everywhere but of varying degrees of rot and facial expression/intent, that sort of thing. I’m not sure if I could pinpoint this as my exact aesthetic in childhood. My pumpkinseed self decorated basically with whatever small, cute, family-friendly things I could afford on allowance and birthday money, with an emphasis on pumpkins, cutesy sheet ghosts, and of course, those tiny, generic little scarecrows that never seem to go out of style, and are the...

 Sometimes it’s funny to think about what a walking contradiction I was in childhood. If there was a children’s book written about me when I was young, it would likely be titled something like “The Little Girl Who Was Scared Of Everything But Somehow Loved Halloween”. Perhaps I should write that! But today, I’d like to share just one silly story; an example of my extreme scaredy-cat-ness despite my obsession with Halloween. Our family tradition when I was small, was to spend a long weekend down the Jersey Shore in late summer. Despite my dislike of the heat, I enjoyed the change of scenery, and knowing I’d always be getting a buttload of new toys thanks to my father’s almost eerily perfect claw machine skills. Occasionally, other events would go on on the boardwalk as well, specifically “Family Fun Nights”, which I clearly remember being sponsored by Pepsi back in the day. These nights consisted of all sorts of fun activities, mainly geared toward kids, and culminated in a little b...

  Is winter the most hopeless time within the countdown to Halloween? There is definitely a case to be made.  The cold air comes, making everything brittle. The snow falls, and buries beneath it any last remnants of autumn that there may have been. The Christmas decorations, which seem to have been up forever, are still there well past Valentine’s Day, as it’s always too cold or too snow-covered or ice-glazed to go outside and take them down. The lights blink tirelessly, almost as if they, too, have grown weary of being up all this time. The countdown seems to move in a very reluctant way, away from three-hundred days. The days feel like an endless frozen wasteland, as if autumn and Halloween are an entire world away. But Halloween never strays too far from the ones that love and believe in it. As a new patch of pumpkins waits to be born, don’t forget about the ones that are still lingering. Somewhere, out there in the cold, buried within the snow, are the rotting pumpkins who...

 I am always looking for new Halloween-themed movies to watch. Anything that sets the perfect mood in the off-season, or at the very least, is a fun watch in the spirit of the season, will almost instantly become a go-to.  But, sadly, many of the Halloween-themed horror films that can be found on streaming services suffer from… issues. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes these movies so subpar, but in many cases,  I think a huge part of the problem is that they try so hard to live up to the standards set by the more popular films, that they ultimately end up shooting themselves in the foot.  One such movie came to me today in the form of Candy Corn , a movie that got a lot of buzz in the Halloween community when it was first released in 2019, but hasn’t been free to watch until now.  With its beautifully designed signature pumpkin pail, and the fact that it’s set both on Halloween and at a creepy carnival , Candy Corn almost seemed, at first glan...

  What is a calendar, anyway? It’s just a series of tiny little paper boxes, but people treat them as if they are of the utmost importance.  It’s become almost a joke, among most people that you know. Everyone always asking what your plans are for whichever holiday, and you replying that you don’t really care what you do; it’s just another day. You’ve come to sort of lean into it, in almost a Wednesday Addams-ish type way, but you know that very few people would actually understand how you really feel. New Year’s is probably the holiday that baffles you most of all. People act as though midnight, as December thirty-first turns into January first, is some sort of magical transition time when suddenly, everything changes. Yet every year, January comes, and most things stay the same. Life can change, or stay the same, for that matter, no matter what the calendar says. Nothing is guaranteed to change just because it’s midnight on January first, or guaranteed to not change just bec...