Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

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