Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

I am six years old. 1993. Halloween is approaching fast. I am filled with wonder; it's my third year of truly understanding it, celebrating it. I am on the phone with my Aunt Trish. She is the reason I started trick-or-treating. The reason I faced my 'fear' of Halloween and was able to embrace it as my own. We're discussing the upcoming holiday, the plans, hoping for no rain as I have been sick the last few weeks.  Somehow I get on the subject of a Barbie doll I saw recently a local store. She's a friend of Barbie I've never seen or heard of before, Kayla. I'm not sure what it is that enchants me so much about her. She's new, she's different, her name is somewhat close to mine...It could be anything, but I want her. I'm not sure why I'm telling my aunt this, maybe a hope that she'll buy her for me. Kids do silly things out of desperation. It feels urgent. Aunt Trish doesn't offer to buy the doll for me, though. However, she tells me t...

Christmas lingers, like a stain that won't wash out. The party is over, yet all the evidence of it remains.  No one questions whether or not it happened. The signs of it are everywhere. The word is on everyone's tongues, the decorations remain, the music still blares. Three days later and it looks like it's still coming. The world is still so jovial. Christmas is not celebrated for a single day. It goes on, allowing each individual to decide when it is over. As if the universe itself is refusing to let it go. As I stare at the Christmas wonderland still built up around me on December 28th, I think only about Halloween. I think about how quickly Halloween disappears. How quickly it's packed up again come November 1st morning. As if people are embarrassed to admit that they enjoy it, that they even celebrate it in the first place. Christmas is treated like a prestigious trophy, while Halloween is treated like an undergarment left out on a clothesline. Get it away. Get it ...

 I am still going on post-Halloween depression walks on Christmas Eve. I am always looking for the remnants of Halloween. Not just the forgotten decorations, or the pumpkins still fighting for their place in this world, but also the feelings. The dead leaves. The memories. The smell in the air. The ghost that whispers to me, You didn’t dream it.   It’s so easy to get lost in Christmas, whether you enjoy it or not. I think I do it, too, albeit briefly, but it’s impossible not to when it suffocates the world for so long. This afternoon I found myself watching some Christmas-themed films from my youth, trying to feel something. It’s beaten so far into our heads that we’re supposed to feel something this time of year, that we have to. I lose myself to the desperation and depression. I lose myself to the memories of a childhood that will never return, to feelings I can’t and won’t get back. December is like a funeral…for childhood, for autumn, for different variations of myself. It...

 The December pumpkin is tired. The December pumpkin has been living in fear. A nagging fear since the very dawn of November 1st, as the world around them turned into something they didn’t recognize. Beautiful, natural colors replaced with blinding, manufactured lights. Their brethren rotted, or simply discarded, as men made of snow that has not yet fallen take their place. A forgotten world, that just a short time ago, brought joy to so many. The December pumpkin has been told, for so long now, that their time is up. That they shouldn’t exist in this world beyond October. They’re not needed, unimportant. Just succumb to the rot. Fall in line. Surely a pumpkin existing beyond October should have no identity of its own.  There are, of course, many pumpkins who fall victim to this mentality once October has passed. They rot. They crumble. They roll over to make way for Santa Claus and whatever menagerie of colorful creatures he brings with him. For some, there is no turning back...

 2023 has been an interesting year for Halloween-themed/set horror. Several notable movies were released this year and I hope to get around to talking about them all here, when I eventually have the time. However, one particular movie has truly stuck out to me this year:  A movie called Cobweb. You can view the trailer  here . Cobweb is the story of a young boy named Peter, who lives with his very eccentric, very tightly wound parents, Carol and Mark. Peter is bullied in school and seems to always be tense at home, until one night when he begins to hear a strange tapping on his bedroom wall. Peter becomes obsessed with figuring out the source of the tapping, while his parents seem a strange mixture of unbothered and terrified. Soon the source of the tapping begins whispering to Peter, though, offering the friendship that Peter so desperately craves within his lonely existence. At school, Peter meets a new substitute teacher, Miss Devine, who takes a special interest in Pe...

 November 1st used to be my least favorite day of the year. It's painful, still, but in a different way than it used to be. It is both a funeral and a celebration of life. A day of reflection, and some kind of triumph, to see myself and the remaining Halloween decorations still standing. It's difficult, but a strange kind of difficult. I'm coming to realize that the actual hardest day of the year for me, might in fact be the day after Thanksgiving. I believe I have said this over the course of multiple years: Thanksgiving is the final breath of autumn. I held onto it in childhood, despite my dislike of it then, because the pumpkins and scarecrows, and sometimes, still, the ghosts and bats and spiders and whatever else, would often hold on through then. Autumn lingered, though grayer and more bitter, more brittle, but it was still there, through Thanksgiving Day. The world has evolved in the strangest of ways...I have watched Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas compete wi...

Something I find interesting, as we head into the "holiday" season, is how society in general tends to view Valentine's Day as some sort of manufactured obligation. All through January and early February, you just hear constantly about how the things meant to be expressed on February 14th, should be expressed freely any other day of the year. And yes, despite the fact that Valentine's Day is and always has been my second favorite holiday, it's a valid point. No calendar date should dictate when we show love and appreciation to anyone in our lives. It should just simply be done.  Something I've come to notice, though, probably heavily due to working in retail as long as I have, is that, despite their insistence on celebrating, people treat the holidays like some sort of awful obligation. This time of year brings out the worst in people rather than the best. And it just leaves me wondering, why do it, then? I do understand the importance of tradition, to an exte...

 It's been two weeks now since Halloween.  This year, I was able to hold onto things a little more than usual, with continued events and multiple trips to The Great Jack O'Lantern Blaze, but it's finally hitting me now that the official time of Halloween is, in fact, over. It's funny, because when I say this on social media, I suddenly get flooded with people telling me it's not really over, or that it's always in my heart. (Or my least favorite, trying to push me into the, spooky or otherwise, Christmas spirit. Please read  this post  before you attempt to go down that road.)  The strange thing is, I know these things. I very obviously know how to hold onto Halloween despite calendar dates.When it comes to my free time, I essentially live completely outside the confines of a calendar. And yet, I can't help but feel that heaviness now, two weeks later, as Halloween gets put away and forgotten once again by the outside world.  What does it mean when I say I ...

 I went for a walk this afternoon. I suppose I may be somewhat known for my "Post-Halloween Depression Walks", during which I walk around the neighborhood, obviously after Halloween has passed, and basically search for signs of life. Decorations still on display, waiting for be noticed, accepted, in this world where they are suddenly no longer welcome after a short month of being revered. Today I found a few. Some I've admired since October began, still going strong. Some new ones that seem to have appeared on the night of Halloween, just visiting for a moment. But of course I also found empty spaces, voids where Halloween once stood.  And at one house, I saw an open storage shed, full of all of the decorations that had been on display, proudly lit, the last time I passed. I think, for some reason, this one hurt most of all. Perhaps, as a child, I took my holiday decorating and celebration cues from Christmas. Christmas, on some level, is celebrated for at least the entir...

 Every year I talk about November 1st...it's such a confusing day. It makes me feel so many emotions all at once. Mournful, depressed, angry...It's like a slap in the face shoving us into a new month, forcing us to forget what came just hours before. Last year, I did have somewhat of  an epiphany  regarding the month of November as a whole, and while I do my best to keep my own past words in mind, that doesn't make today any easier. Or easy to explain, for that matter. I suppose I should speak from my heart.  Today I feel detached from reality, as if I don't really exist. Like there is no longer a place in the world for me. Just yesterday everything I loved made sense, and was loved and revered by everyone else as well. I felt like I fit. But now, today, I see those same things being quickly shoved away. Less than twenty-four hours after trick-or-treating time began, it's all being swept under the rug. The season culminated and the world is no longer a place I recog...

I know I have told the story here before of   my worst childhood Halloween , but I recently was reminded of another year that was less than wonderful: Halloween 1998. Sixth grade. The year I, for some reason, chose to dress up as an angel. (This is not me, unfortunately. This is Angelica. I sadly don't have many pictures at all of myself from my childhood Halloweens, though I remember them being taken.) Halloween 1998 came with some apprehension to start with, as it was the first year since the fateful  Cinderella Incident , and I wasn't sure what was "safe" to dress up as. Not that I would have let my peers influence me that much, necessarily, but that past year had been stressful and the last thing I wanted was a repeat performance. Especially now that we were in sixth grade and would be headed to middle school the next year. If my classmates had thought being ten years old was a big deal, the middle school jump was even bigger. It was honestly a stressful time.  An...

 The recent release of this year's McDonald's Boo Buckets has me thinking a lot about my childhood Halloweens, and how McDonald's played a very pivotal role pretty much until adulthood for me.  We had some of the old buckets in our home from before I was even born. My grandfather was an avid collector of anything and everything that he thought could be of value, or at least of amusement to future children of the family, so I often wound up with things like that. The buckets were actually some of my favorite toys from a very young age, likely my earliest Halloween memories.  As I got older, though, the collecting gene passed onto me. I always hoped to complete a McDonald's toy collection and Halloween was, of course, always a priority. When the costumed McNuggets came out, that first year I managed to collect all but the pumpkin, which was, of course, the one I'd wanted most. I have a distinct memory of going to McDonald's one night, in the final days before Hall...

 I saw a movie once; I think it was some variation of Barbie. In this movie a fairy realm existed, all the time, invisible to the naked eye. Only when the characters wore special glasses, could they see the true magic around them, the magic that the fairies saw every day without effort. I don't know when or why I watched this movie, I'm thinking I may have been babysitting a child, likely the niece of my ex, but I can tell you it's always made me think of Halloween, and the things I've struggled to put into words for years and years.  I went for a walk yesterday, and the thing that struck me so hard about the world around me was the sudden familiarity of it. I think a lot about a walk I took on October 29th of last year, and the sights I saw. Every walk or drive I took between then and now, I saw the echoes of these creatures and these sights. The residual feeling of something that was and would eventually be again. I don't know if other people's Halloween decor...

The start of autumn, to me, always feels like seeing something in real life that you've seen in a dream. I remember once, during one of my many, many dreams about trick-or-treating on a day other than October 31st, seeing a house. I think the house, in the dream, was owned by a vampire man with a yard full of bats. Sometime later, I was in another state visiting family, and, because my father was in training for a marathon at the time, he insisted we go for a walk. On that walk that night, I saw a house that greatly resembled the one from my dream. It invoked a similar emotion, and lit up a spark inside of me, of excitement and curiosity. I believe this was the first time I ever experienced that, seeing something from a dream in reality, but it certainly wasn't the last.  I don't remember all of my dreams, but the ones I do remember tend to stay with me. The imagery, the emotions, the general feeling of it.  And autumn itself is very similar.  It's no secret that I thin...

  It's September 9th and I've spent the day depressed. Yesterday was my birthday. I briefly think about the fact that when I was younger, on the internet, I always said my birthday was the 9th rather than the 8th, because back then, giving out personal information online was a terrifying idea.  It's funny how things change. My birthday this year, well, it was a disaster. And that had everything to do with how hot and sunny it was.  I've never considered myself a summer baby. September is fall, whether it's the 1st or the 30th. The last stepping stone on the way to October; one of two months that truly feels similar to it. September the Hopeful, and November the Mournful.  But I guess this year, Mother Nature just had to tell me I was wrong. I won't forgive the demon summer for striking me down on what was supposed to be my special day. Seasonal depression can only be endured for so long. Tonight, though, I step outside, and the wind picks up. It sounds like a ho...

As you most likely already know, Halloween-themed movies are tremendously important to me. For most of my life, when I needed a dose of Halloween in the off-season, or even wanted to make an October afternoon feel extra special and anticipatory, I’d turn to movies that would immediately transport me back into the most important day of my year.  I will watch pretty much anything relating to Halloween, whether it’s a horror film, a tv special, something intended for small children, or pretty much anything in between. And over the years, across genres, I’ve accumulated some go-to movies that capture Halloween for me like nothing else, and can make my heart leap with excitement as if it were October 30th, on, say, any random Tuesday in May. These are the movies that inspire me, and keep me going even at the worst points in my calendar year. A few days ago, I had the absolutely amazing opportunity to view a new film called The Pumpkin Man before its general release. I’ve been following ...

 As the Criminologist in The Rocky Horror Picture Show once said: I would like, if I may, to take you on a strange journey. It begins in the year of our gourd, 2008. It was, if I recall correctly, around the time of July 4th, and a Yankee Candle catalog appeared in the mail. This was shortly before the beginning of the layman's spooky season aligned with the Fourth of July, so you can imagine how thrilled I was when this catalog contained Halloween...featuring a collection of skeletons known as the Boney Bunch. I was immediately enamored with them (It's probably worth noting that I was also heavy into my Tim Burton, particularly Corpse Bride,  era at this point.) and felt compelled to make a wishlist. My mother was holding on for my Aunt Trish, who as you know if you've read previous entries here is the reason I got into Halloween in the first place, to decide what she wanted so we could just place one big order to save on shipping, and this took maybe a week or so. Now, at...