Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

The end of Valentine’s Day has been weighing heavily on my mind. Being my second-favorite holiday, I suppose that’s to be expected…but the truth is, I feel the weight of the end of every  holiday. It doesn't matter if it's a holiday I celebrate or not. It can be a big holiday, like Christmas, or a small one, like Saint Patrick's Day. It can even be a holiday from a different culture, that I may actually know very little about.  For the few days after every holiday, I feel a strange heaviness.  It's never as all-consuming as it is for me immediately after Halloween. Valentine's Day comes somewhat close but, of course, doesn't quite touch it. Still, though... I look at the leftover decorations, the clearance aisles, the social media posts from the previous days, and I feel strangely about it. I think of how painful it is for me, to watch Halloween get torn down, stored away, reduced to a fifty-percent-off pile of candy corn on a grocery store display. On February ...

 Like many others in the spooky community this year, I decided to make Lisa Frankenstein a part of my Valloween celebration.  The name of this movie alone caught my eye, as a child of the Lisa Frank renaissance of the 90s. I will never forget the excitement of buying more stationary than I could ever possibly use in a lifetime, for the brightly colored animals depicted on it. I was obsessed. I actually had an entire binder full of Lisa Frank folders that I refused to actually use. Honestly, it was probably the most bizarre, yet least expensive, hobby I ever had. So yes, the name of the movie alone gave me all the nostalgic pangs, even though I knew it wasn't going to be about bright fuchsia kittens and dogs the color of the blinding sun on an August afternoon.  I waffled back and forth about whether or not I wanted to see this movie, though. Oddly enough, considering my love for Valentine's Day, romance in general tends to make me tune out of a story. And, in this post- T...

 It's that time of year again. The time when I, arguably the reigning queen of not living life by a calendar, shocks the world, or at least the online community, by declaring that my second favorite holiday, the only non-Halloween holiday I genuinely care about, is, in fact, Valentine's Day.  If you've followed me long enough, maybe you know this already, but it's become tradition for me to talk about it here each year.  I've loved Valentine's Day as long as I've been alive. My heart would leap as a child, when the stores would start turning pink and red, filled with random stuffed animals and silly puns presented by doe-eyed puppies and kittens, or of-the-moment children's TV and movie stars. Second only to choosing my Halloween costume, was the decision of which Valentines I would hand out in class. I still remember second grade, thinking I'd be the coolest kid in class because everyone was so obsessed with The Lion King and I managed to find Valen...