Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

  I have never been a fan of the spring and summer months. My interest in warm weather and sunny days has waned over the course of time to the point where it is now virtually non-existant.  And yet, somehow, I feel we are, on some level, entering the “better half” of the year. Last year , I spoke about how I started calculating the halfway point to Halloween as a teenager and eventually came to know the term “Halfoween”, thanks to randomly seeing an ad for the popular TV series (which I think was also recently rebooted), iCarly. For years I tried to find ways to celebrate this milestone day, and though I was mostly alone in it for awhile, I always tried to make it feel special. As time has gone on, I’ve found ways to celebrate Halloween in some capacity literally every day of the year, but there is still is something incredibly special about Halfoween itself. The way the Halloween community has come together to embrace this day truly astounds me. I grew up thinking that it was...

 For those who celebrate such things, today is, on the Gregorian calendar, Easter Sunday. The Halloween community doesn’t seem to have a specific name for this holiday, as it does for “Creepmas”, or “Valloween”, but I have a tendency to refer to it as “Creepster”. I was thinking about it earlier today, though, and I realized…there are actually quite a few things about Easter that qualify it as “creepy”.  For one thing, I suppose I’ll get the semi-controversial stuff out of the way first. I’m really not religious, and never really have been. My mother is, to an extent. It doesn’t consume her but she finds it a comfort, and so I made traditional Christian sacraments like communion, confession, etc., and attended CCD classes until I was in middle school. It was interesting to me as I’ve always enjoyed learning, but many parts of the stories actually scared me. I’ve never read the Bible cover to cover or anything like that, but just of what I know of the religion I was taught as a...

 I recently remembered an assignment I was given when I was a sophomore in high school. Spring was coming, and our biology teacher wanted us to make some sort of journal, observing trees and plants in our yards and how they changed as spring began. I don’t remember a whole lot about this assignment, but I remember focusing on a lilac bush that my father had planted years before, and having to dry and press a piece of it into the little binder I was using for the project, but the thing that stands out the most in my memory was that the final piece of the journal was supposed to be some sort of essay about what we learned about the seasons changing and how the coming of spring made us feel. (I still think this assignment would’ve been better suited to a language arts class, but what do I know?)  I was always better at writing than I was at things like math and science, but I found this particular assignment difficult. I have never been a fan of warm, sunny weather, and the comin...

 It’s time for another random review of something I didn’t expect to resonate with me! The other day I was having a nostalgia moment (something that happens a lot to me, if you couldn’t tell), and started thinking about one of my favorite book series to read when I was much, much younger. I’m sure most people, especially those who grew up in the 90s like yours ghoully, are aware of  The Babysitters Club. I’ve actually seen it go through many different incarnations in my lifetime, from the original book series, to a short-lived HBO series, to a few spinoff book series, to a movie, to the current Netflix series and graphic novels. It’s something that’s pretty universal. However, my favorite thing to come out of the BSC franchise when I was a child was actually the spinoff book series about BSC founder and president Kristy Thomas’s younger stepsister, Karen Brewer: Babysitters Little Sister. I’m not sure how popular the Little Sister series was, but in my youth, I preferred it to...

 It’s probably safe to say that I didn’t exactly “come of age” in the normal way, like you see portrayed in media. I’m thirty-four years old and still very much a “kid” in a lot of ways, some good, and some, admittedly, not so much. I’ve never had the same interests or priorities as “normal” people, and spend more time than I care to admit thinking I’m just simply not cut out for “adulthood” in the traditional sense, When I was much younger, I actually just assumed that either somehow things would magically fall into place, or I’d somehow end up dead before I ever had to deal with any of it. (Yes, I’ve always been on the morbid side. And, for the record, I didn’t have any specific thoughts on how I’d end up dead; I really wasn’t suicidal or anything. I just could never picture myself as a functioning adult and started thinking that maybe I wasn’t ever intended to make it that far.) However, I am mostly happy with who I am today, and I’ve been thinking a lot lately that, while it wa...