Winter’s Rot//October 103rd, 2022

 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 haven’t left us yet. 

It may seem like they no longer exist, but they do. They are out there, and they are beacons of hope in this dreary cold. 

The Halloween flame is always burning, and it can melt the winter, if you let it.