October Eve//October 365th, 2024

I have probably spent a significant part of my adult life chasing the high of Christmas Eve in my childhood.

Though Halloween was always my favorite holiday, Christmas Eve felt like this otherworldly time, when the whole world sat on edge, waiting for something magical to happen. And once the morning came, everything would be as it had been the year before.

A homecoming.

I haven’t felt that way about Christmas in a very long time, but tonight I feel that excitement once more.

I see the pieces coming back together. The decorations I mourned last year reappearing, on neighbors’ lawns and doorsteps, in stores I visit. Pumpkins, real pumpkins, are alive and waiting once more, relevant again, no longer the rotting forms left over from a night no one seems to remember.

We are seen. The world looks like a place I recognize again, and I don’t have to squint so hard to see it.

I don’t look across the lake and imagine the green trees turning orange and red and yellow, because now they are. I don’t think about the ghosts that once welcomed visitors to the neighbor’s yard, because they are back again. I don’t stand in the cemetery and look longingly at the farm stand on the other side of the street and try to picture all of the pumpkins once for sale, because they have arrived again.

When I wake up tomorrow, the world will officially be as I dream for so long every year.

The things I love, the things that are part of me all year round, become acceptable again. People are having fun with the things that make me smile every day. I don’t have to imagine it. Don’t have to long for it. Don’t have to sit in silence, trying to hold onto when it was here.

Because it is here now.

I may not ever feel the same way about Christmas again, but I can tell you that the coming of October feels more amazing than anything Santa Claus might carry in the sack on his sleigh.

Happy October Eve.

We made it.

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Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

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