Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

  The most amazing thing happened to me, on a Saturday afternoon.  The date was August 30th, just two days before Labor Day; the start of September, and, thankfully, the unofficial (but official, in my book) end of summer.  I wound up at a local toy shop, coming away with some tiny plushies. (Two of them Christmas themed, ironically, as I am working toward finding the magic in all things once more .) As I exited the store, something caught my eye beyond the fence leading to the next residential street.  A very tall pumpkin man seemed to be walking toward a house. My mind snapped back to when I was six years old, the very first time the Great Pumpkin came to visit me. How I'd heard him in the night, a candle rattling around in his head as he did his work, ensuring the happiest of Halloweens for the truest of believers. How special it felt to know I was one of his Chosen.  I'd always hoped to thank him one day. I quietly tiptoed around the fence, out into the narr...

  I heard someone say, the other day, that we are heading into the final week of summer before Labor Day, before it's 'back to reality' . This was such a strange thing for me to hear.  The season that September will usher in, has always been the dream state for me.  'Back to reality' is a phrase I associate with coming back from a vacation, or the end of a magical event. I have never once thought of entering the fall season as the end of something. Fall is the event.  When I think of summer, I think of the mundane. The bright, generic reality that people seem to love to exist within. It's a time where everyone blends in, but I stand out, my eyes water-bleeding from the sunlight, my body exhausted and my energy zapped from the heat. It feels like being trapped in a cubicle at a 9-5 job, working hours of overtime every day.  I don't know that I can think of anything more mundane and constricting than summer. This is the escape people crave, but summer, for me,...

 It's that time of year again, boils and ghouls! Spooky season has officially arrived on the scene, and Summer Summers of Summerville is just sick about it. She and her cronies are out here acting like that ghost pillow in their local HomeGoods means the beach is now closed until Memorial Day 2026 and the sun will not be seen again until next June. Did you know Halloween decor in July actually shortens people's summers? What a phenomenon!  Obviously, this is not the case. It's still, sadly, meteorologically speaking, very much summer. But those of us who want to look ahead have as much right to do so as thought that don't wish to look ahead have every right to do a strange little thing I'll never understand called "enjoy their summer". It doesn't have to be a battle, and yet, ever year, it is.  Sometimes I think summer people dwell on autumn and Halloween more than those of us that actually live for it. If you're so focused on what other people are...

 I have been doing a lot of inner child healing work as of late. I won't get into all of that here, but, I very recently had a realization I thought was interesting and would like to share. I have so often struggled with the question How did you come to love Halloween so much? It's something that has just always simply been, for me, and I never really questioned it.  But, with recent things I've been thinking about and focusing on, I realized I may have an actual explanation as to how I initially latched onto Halloween so heavily. When I was a child, I absolutely loved holidays. All holidays, big or small. I just always wanted to celebrate.  I've realized recently that this was most likely due to the fact that my life was somewhat boring as a child. I was an only child, and a loner through and through. Though I was good at making my own fun, most of the time, everything in my life was pretty repetitive and routine.  But holidays were different. Holidays were the days...

Here we stand, at the edge of summer. It's that time of year again, when seasonal depression kicks in and the only consolation is the promise of Halloween soon hitting store shelves. This year, more retailers seem to be getting into the spirit of "Summerween", offering actual spooky themed summer merchandise, particularly bedding. I've seen sheets and pillows from TJMaxx , and blankets from Walmart . It's not a motif that I, personally, can really get into, but I'm happy that it exists. Nothing makes me happier than seeing the normalization of being spooky all year round. I'd like to think that soon it will be commonplace for a sheet ghost or skeleton to pop up on different holiday decor throughout the year. Valloween has already caught on, and Summerween seems to be the new thing, so why not Creepmas, Springoween, etc.? I have always said that for me, personally, Halloween is just my style, and is no different to me than it is for other people that decora...

I50 days until Halloween. It's ironic, in a way, that this last leg of the journey is the hardest for me.  I look out the window and see the blinding sun shining on the green leaves, as people walk past in tank tops and flip flops and the lake across the street glimmers in its beautiful, painful way, and I feel further now from Halloween than I did as I left Sleepy Hollow in the late morning hours on November 1st. 150 days, and it feels heavier, longer, than 364. Summer depression is not easy. Hearing about how "gorgeous" it is outside in reference to the weather that drains me physically and mentally, makes me feel more invisible and unimportant than I did in my high school years. The constant bleating of Stop rushing the seasons!   as soon as a pumpkin dares appear on a store shelf, when "rushing the seasons" is the only thing keeping me going, makes me feel like I don't matter. I realized, recently, that a person with summer SAD longing for fall, is no di...

  Many years ago, there was no 'Halloween Community', as we now know it.  There were only us, the children drifting like dry, wayward leaves in a cool breeze, never quite knowing where to land. We were the children whose friends looked at them strangely when we said our favorite holiday wasn't Christmas. We were the children who were called 'creepy' because we preferred ghost stories to fairy tales. If you were one of these children, one of us, you know. Me, personally? I was the little girl who cried when Halloween ended and never brightened at the mention of Christmas on the horizon. I was the little girl who pitched the idea of turning the Jack o' Lanterns around, hiding their scary faces, so that they could linger through Thanksgiving. I was the little girl who tried to start a leaf collection and then was devastated when they all turned brown.  I was the little girl who just wanted Halloween to stay. I was also the little girl who grew into perhaps a more a...

  It was the one gloomy day we really had all October. It had been unseasonably warm. So sunny. The atmosphere of Halloween, of   'spooky season', if you will, was nearly lost.  But that day was different. Good things loomed on the horizon for me. I was about to go off in celebration of my favorite holiday, in my favorite place. If I was lucky, which I was, I might complete the final leg of a particular piece of my healing journey on that trip. I don't know that I've ever been more excited. I called my mother that morning, as I took a walk around the block. Her birthday was the next day. We talked about everything, but mostly how happy I was.  It felt like magic. I came home and sat out in the yard, looking around as I always do, taking in one last glimpse of my home in October. It's always so strange to look at anything, any place, and think, ' Next time I'm here, it won't be October anymore.' I may as well say: Next time I'm here's I won...

I went for a walk tonight. My first in a long time. The last walk I went on, there were still pumpkins out there. Many of them lined up for disposal, some even sitting near garbage cans, awaiting their fate. I wished I could have saved them all.  It's always strange to go on walks when I haven't in awhile. The timing is interesting. Usually, as the last pumpkins left out in the world rot, it becomes too cold to go out again until March arrives.  An interesting cycle; a strange coincidence. In my mind's eye, I can see what once was. And as I walk, I feel like I am in some dream state version of my neighborhood. Like when you dream of your home, but it's not quite your home. An extra hallway, a missing window, a gateway to something that isn't really there, or nothingness where there should be something. It's real, but it isn't. It's familiar, but it's foreign.  I think of the movie Skinamarink, where the children ask, 'Where did it go?' as the...

I live in a state of perpetual hunger. A constant craving for things that, for some, only exist once a year.  It gets difficult, living in that constant state of starvation.  But I've learned to search for scraps, everywhere I go.  When I visit Sleepy Hollow, though, that is when I truly feast. A long four months went by between visits, this time. All the way from my actual celebration of Halloween, from October 29th through the morning of November 1st, until March 6th.  Winter was cold, and brought sickness...It wasn't easy to be away for so long. But, at last, there was a day with a favorable temperature, and so it was time to return to the one true home of my heart, under a gloomy sky, on the most autumnal pre-spring day one could ask for.    It felt like a gift from the universe, almost like a do-over of Halloween. Halloween had been so hot, like an August day. It was fun, sure, one of my best if I'm honest, but the fact that it felt like summer did put...

  It's true that time is precious. I don't delight in getting older. I'm averse to the changes that come with the seasons, not just the weather, but life, in general. I've never been good with change, in any capacity. I'll be 38 this year. I don't know that I ever thought I'd make it this far. Adulthood isn't something I ever wished for as a child. I remember telling my mother that I would purposely flunk school, so I'd never have to grow up. I didn't, obviously. Flunk school, I mean. But I don't know that I really 'grew up' either. Adulthood was never something I identified with, and it still isn't.  I don't feel human most days, never mind adult human.  Maybe my greatest wish would be to stop time. And yet...every year I only long to move forward. To the only time of year that makes sense to me. Perhaps it is the depersonalization I feel through winter, through spring, and through summer, that keeps me longing for autumn.  I...

 We've probably all heard it said that Halloween is the one day of the year where "you don't have to be yourself". It's a tagline of the holiday, ever since I was a child. And I suppose, when I was younger, I felt that my love of Halloween could be connected to my imagination; my desire to play pretend.  I was always big on imaginative play, whether it was physically playing dress-up, or talking to a doll or stuffed animal as if they could hear (I have a very distinct memory of staying up until 11PM one night talking to my Princess Jasmine doll, trying to psychoanalyze my second-grade bullies!) or whether it was a more internal thing, imagining myself in a world outside my own, as a character in a favorite piece of media, or a celebrity in some alternate life. Sometimes I even imagined my own life, but different. Maybe I was best friends with the popular girls, or the first girl in class to have a boyfriend, or even just simply had siblings (such as the twin siste...

    Ah, Valentine's Day.  When I started this blog, just five years ago, I always felt like it was so weird to talk about how Valentine's Day was my second-favorite holiday.  Honestly, I felt like it was a strange thing to say in general, as I had for most of my life.  I was never the romantic type. I wasn't a little girl who dreamed of my wedding day or anything like that...I honestly didn't even tend to get crushes all that often. The other girls thought it was weird or that I was hiding something when they'd ask the age-old question, "Who do you like?" and I never had an answer.  Yet somehow, I was also the little girl whose heart leapt when the pink-and-red explosion of Valentine's Day started making its way into the world. The Cupid silhouettes, the punny cards, and especially the little anthropomorphic heart people, all held a special place in my heart, only rivaled by the space permanently occupied by the pumpkins and ghosts and skeletons of Hal...

 Five years ago today, I started this blog.  I've never truly been one for "New Year's resolutions", or New Year's at all, really, but just before 2020, I promised myself that I would start blogging again. I've loved to write since I was six years old. I very clearly remember the first little "picture book" I put together. I had actually just watched an episode of Lamb Chop's Play-Along,  where Shari Lewis gave instructions on how to make a little flip book of sorts of a girl jumping rope. I've always been a DIY disaster, so my attempt at recreating this little scene did not go according to plan. It frustrated me, but I somehow got the idea to turn it into a story that I titled "Jill's Bike". I don't remember the specifics of the story, but I believe it was about a girl, obviously named Jill, getting frustrated with her attempts to jump rope, and finally deciding to go and ride her bike instead. It was a short little story, ...