Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

 As I’ve mentioned before, I often spend significant amounts of time browsing through Halloween-themed movies on streaming services, hoping to find something that truly speaks to me. There’s a certain something that I look for in Halloween movies that I can’t quite explain, and I usually know, fairly quickly, when I’ve found it, or, also, when I haven’t. Not that certain movies aren’t fun watches even if they don’t have that something, and I’ll talk more about those types of movies in the future, but today, I stumbled upon a movie that will surely be added to my list of go-tos and really want to share it. This is a little movie that came out last September, called Bad Candy. A few people I know within the Halloween community have watched this movie, but I never hear anyone talk much about it. I won’t lie, I put it on today as background noise while doing some cleaning, fully expecting it to not hold my interest enough to want to actually sit still and watch it. I tend to get cranky...

 When I was younger, I spent a lot of time wondering if I actually had a place in the world.  I was an only child, quiet and shy, who never really fit in. My interests were somehow always all wrong in comparison to my peers, and my family, even if they tried not to show it, were often disappointed in the fact that I didn’t have “normal” priorities, from school, to socialization, etc. I was always the odd one out. And, of course, there was the fact that my favorite holiday was Halloween, not Christmas as everyone around me and society as a whole seemed to insist it should be. I also spent a lot of time wondering why I liked Halloween so much. There had to be a reason, some place that I really belonged that would one day call me back, like the little girls in movies who suddenly found out they were the rightful princesses of fairytale realms. I pondered this thought daily, well into my adult years. In 1999, though, a movie called Halloweentown was released on the Disney Channel....

 2020 was, most definitely, a strange year. There are many things that happened over the course of the year that I would consider “notable”, in many different ways.  But one of the most interesting things that happened in 2020, was meeting a very special pumpkin on September 29th. As you may or may not know, I work in a grocery store. And, every year, we get a decent amount of pumpkins in, though every year, the variety diminishes a bit. When I first started working, we often had pumpkin wonderlands in the months of September and October. Maybe not as much as the local farms got, but we had many pumpkins of many sizes and colors, some painted, some with hats or fuzzy hair, one year even a giant one that was priced over $300. As the years have gone on, though, the pumpkin selection at work has gotten very basic. Just your typical orange pumpkins, in small, medium, or large. (And, annoyingly, not to be seen again after Halloween. In the old days, we’d have a handful available th...