Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

 It was announced today that all Party City stores are going to be closing, very soon. I can't say that I didn't see this coming from miles away.  For the last several years, I've noticed much of their Halloween stock has been the same, save for the animatronics, which still seemed to be a very new thing to the company. The hanging ghouls, the skeletons, the cutesy, family-friendly stuff...they've basically just been recycling it all since at least 2019 or so, with a couple of occasional new additions thrown in. I can't remember the last time I went to Party City expecting to be "wowed", save for the Terrifier release.  And from what I hear, those that preordered the animatronics this past season, generally got shafted. Preorders being cancelled, items not actually coming in stock until a week or two before Halloween...I heard so many stories around the community. Not to mention the fact that the product that almost put them back on the map, Rattles the gr...

You may already know, I consider one of my biggest "flexes" in life to be the fact that I beat arachnophobia. I worked very hard to overcome a lifelong fear of spiders, in about 2010 or so, and now I love spiders and actually prefer Halloween decor that features them. You can read more about that in  this post . I've come a long way with it and though it may sound silly, I consider it a huge accomplishment. Overcoming any fear, no matter how big or small, is always something to be proud of. I thought it would be fun today, though, to revisit one of my funniest stories from the time when I was still very much, almost obsessively and irrationally, arachnophobic. The year was 2000. I had just turned thirteen, and I believe I was back-to-school shopping with my mother and aunt at one of the nearby malls. This mall, strangely enough, had a CVS inside of it, and from the outside, across from the Old Navy where most of my wardrobe from ages 12-14 came from, we could see that the...

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...

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...

 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) ...

 It's time for another round of 90s Kid Halloween Nostalgia! Sometimes it saddens me that today's kids will likely never know the true magic of Saturday morning cartoons. There was something about that feeling of waking up, maybe earlier than we should have been on a day off, but wanting to make the most of our day, knowing we had two full days of freedom ahead of us. Somehow the cartoon blocks felt like a celebration. As if Saturday was a weekly holiday and Saturday morning cartoons were the party we were always invited to, or the special we waited for with bated breath.  Some of my fondest memories of my childhood weekends are of losing myself in those cartoons for several hours. My favorite block of all was the  One Saturday Morning  block on ABC, run by Disney. It premiered just after I turned ten, and it immediately became a weekly fixture in my life, with me counting down the days until it came back around, and begging my parents not to plan any outings until t...

 One of my absolute favorite pastimes is watching old Halloween content on YouTube. Most of my nights end with a compilation of vintage Halloween commercials, old Halloween safety PSAs, or Halloween specials from my youth. There's nothing I find more relaxing.  A few days ago, I suddenly had a memory of an old spooky cartoon I hadn't in seen ages, a movie I used to rent from the video store as a child called The Ketchup Vampires , and felt compelled to look it up.  Both  The Ketchup Vampires  and its sequel/prequel  Ketchup Vampires 2  are available on YouTube. And let me tell you, this unlocked some major memories for me! The original movie is dated 1995, so I would have been seven or eight at the time, depending on the month of its release. But I vividly remember discovering it at our local video rental place.  I had wandered over to the children's section while my mother looked through the new releases in the main part of the store. Looking rig...

 As a 90s kid, I have a lot of memories and attachments to Halloween episodes of popular kids’ TV series of the time. Even if I didn’t necessarily like a particular series, or watch it regularly, I usually tuned into whatever they were offering at Halloween-time. I’ve often said, I’ll pretty much watch Halloween-relating anything. One such instance was with an early-90s Nickelodeon series called The Adventures Of Pete & Pete. I enjoyed this show to some extent, but I was a little young to truly get it at the time during which it initially aired. (It started in 1993,  when I would have been turning six, and ended in 1996, when I was nine.) I also wasn’t super into live-action shows, so I don’t have vivid memories of watching it, though I know I did. I just remember it being a show about two brothers, both for some reason named Pete, going on adventures that were sort of surreal at times. On a strange sidenote, I do remember contemplating the lyrics to the theme song  f...