If I'm known for anything, it is probably the fact that I try to hold onto Halloween, keep the spirit alive, and spread that spooky joy, all year long, no matter what the calendar says. Halloween is such a part of me that I've long-since stopped thinking of it as simply being a "season". It's just...what I like. Who I am. To me, hanging Halloween decorations year round is no different than if I chose to decorate in the motif of any favorite color or animal or aesthetic. Some people like a woodland theme, some people, gourd help them, like a beach theme...I just prefer vintage Halloween party meets twisted pumpkin patch.
Sadly, it didn't always occur to me that I could celebrate Halloween all year round if I wanted. I truly don't know if it was a fear of being thought of as "weird" in my younger years (though I'm not sure by whom as it's not like I ever had classmates come over, and my childhood best friend was always into witchy stuff) or perhaps just the worry that Halloween would no longer feel "special" if I lived in it all year round, but for whatever reason, I felt no choice but to lay Halloween to rest shortly after the day had passed, in my younger years.
One year when this became particularly difficult for me, though, was the year I had just turned twelve, at the end of 1999.
Twelve was not an easy year for me, for many reasons, but, most notably, this was the year I started seventh grade. Middle school. I already felt too babyish to exist among my peers, and being put into an environment where I was expected to act like a pre-teen felt like a nightmare. I felt so uprooted, leaving the comfort of my elementary school, where I knew everyone, including the teachers, and where having very few friends didn't feel quite as lonely. Everything in middle school felt like too much. On my first day, I had a panic attack when I got home. On my birthday, less than a week after school began, I got my very first ocular migraine. My stomach would turn itself inside out on Sunday nights, as the weekend drew to a close and I knew I was had no choice but to face down another school week. I was never one of those kids that looked forward to going to school, but 1999 was the year I began to dread it.
Comfort eventually came, though, in the way that it always does for me: Through Halloween.
In a more detailed post, I talked about going for a ride on an autumn afternoon, and discovering a die-cut pumpkin who I named Winky, in someone's window, and suddenly remembering that despite all of the changes and challenges in my life during that time, Halloween was still coming. (You can read even more about Winky here. It's probably my favorite story I've ever told.) Once that knowledge came back to me, once I remembered who I was and what was important to me in that moment, I held onto it with an iron grip. Whenever the new-seventh-grader panic would set in, throughout the month of October, all I had to do was remind myself that I still had Halloween. It was still coming. Despite all of these crazy changes in my life, my favorite thing in the universe could not be touched by these changes. I think, at this point, this was the most excited I'd ever gotten about Halloween, which was saying something. This was probably the first year that I began to recognize it as a salvation, not just a day that I enjoyed more than most people.
For the month of October, the jitters in my stomach turned to butterflies of excitement. The end of the weekends just meant Halloween was getting closer. Instead of fearing that everyone's eyes were on me in the middle school hallways, I searched instead for decorations, forming a particular attachment to the simplest of banners, printed out with a fancy font and clip art of a witch flying across a moon, that simply said, "Happy Halloween". (Perhaps I liked it so much because it replaced whatever "welcome" banner had been there before it, constantly reminding me of my newness.) I wrote about Halloween obsessively in my journals, and happily chose my second-ever pumpkin costume to wear that year, drawing out possibilities for how I would style it in one of my many notebooks. I remember talking in detail about how the anticipation made me feel; again, probably the first time I ever truly acknowledged it in that way. Middle school may have felt like a bully, but it could not plow through Halloween to get to me. Halloween was my protector, and it kept me safe and happy.
Until, of course, sadly, it had to end.
To say Halloween's end hit me like a ton of bricks that year would be an understatement. And to add insult to injury, Halloween had fallen on a Sunday that year. In the matter of one magical, but short, day, I was suddenly back to square one with my middle school anxiety. I'd quite literally wished the weekend away to get to Halloween, but then it came and went. The perfect wall between myself and my perceived problems was being torn down, and I didn't know what to do. When I went back to school in the morning, that banner I loved would probably be gone. No one would be talking about what they were going to dress up as, or what candies they hoped to get. Everything was just going to go back to this strange new normal.
As I began to deteriorate back into my pre-October self, the me that didn't have Halloween to count on in the near future anymore, my mother asked me, since we weren't going to take the decorations down for probably another week or so anyway, why I didn't just try to keep it going a little while longer.
I wasn't exactly sure how to do this at first, but then I remembered a scene from the Halloween episode of Pepper Ann, in which one of the characters came up with the concept of "Halloweek". In the show, Halloweek was the week leading into Halloween, but, I figured, since Halloween had fallen on a Sunday, why couldn't it be the start of something instead? Like how Christmas celebrations often bleed into New Year's? I quickly went to work, trying to come up with a "theme" for each night of the coming week, each relating to something specific that I loved about Halloween. Sadly, I don't remember all of them. The only ones I recall for sure were "Costume Night", on which I dressed up in my costume again, and "Doggie Night", a reference to the the fact that I loved seeing dogs out and about, and running to the doors, on Halloween night. This was celebrated by piling a bunch of stuffed dogs onto my bed. I'm pretty sure I also intended to watch Halloween-y movies throughout this Halloweek, though I'm not sure what I would have watched, as I wasn't into horror yet. My only real option at this point would have been Hocus Pocus, though it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility that I would have watched that every night for a week. It makes me sad that I don't fully remember, nor do I remember if I actually was able to follow through and keep my Halloween celebration going for the entire week. I have a vague memory of my father needing to do something with the computer that was in my room during Costume Night, actually. But the important thing, I suppose, was that I tried. This year, and this attempted week-long celebration of Halloween, was definitely a turning point in my realization that I didn't have to limit myself to just one night a year.
Nothing has to be "seasonal", if it makes us happy.
Stay spooky, my friends.
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