Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

People have always asked me what it is that I love so much about Halloween. Why it's so important to me. How it all came to be. And this has always been the hardest question for me to answer.  I've never really known.  I just remember Halloween coming into my life one day ( October 31st, 1991 , to be exact) when I was four years old, and I was never the same again. I was me from that day forward.  But the more I think about Halloween in adulthood, the more I see what an escape it is, for everyone. I think there's a reason why it comes earlier each year now, and why it has such a loyal following, whether you're in it year round or just wait for it to come back every year.  I think the world needs Halloween.  People need to be able to take comfort in the things that maybe would normally not be "socially acceptable". Be who we actually want to be, even if it's just for a short while. I've always thought you could tell a lot about a person based on the cos...

 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...

 Something I’ve been seeing a lot this year around the Halloween community, possibly more than any other year, has been talk of consumerism, how much money spent on Halloween is too much, whether collecting is really that important or if it’s somehow required to truly be a part of the community, etc. I’m in no way trying to copy anyone else who’s already spoken on this subject, but I thought I would chime in and share my thoughts, as it is something I definitely think about. Now, I’ve always been relatively fortunate when it comes to how much money I have to spend on Halloween goodies. As a child, I often received money for my birthday, September 8th, at the height of the shopping season, at least as I knew it back then. No, it wasn’t enough to collect the way I do now, but it was enough to make me happy, and you also could get a lot more for a lot less back then. I didn’t necessarily stop to think about my “hauls”, but I knew even at a young age that there was nothing I’d rat...

 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...

 Something you may or may not have known about me, but possibly suspected:  I trick-or-treated until I was way past the age that society seems to deem “too old”. And, since every October, the question of “How old is ‘too old’?” seems to come back around, I thought I’d share my experiences, in defense of those “big kids” who may come around on Halloween night. As you obviously know if you know me at all, Halloween is my absolute life, and has more or less been such since my first experience with trick-or-treating at the age of four. Trick-or-treating was a magical thing to me, as a kid whose parents set strict bedtimes and very rarely ventured out for more than typical mundane tasks. It was just such a deep contrast to the rest of my life in my childhood, that it quickly became my favorite thing to do. Perhaps Halloween became my favorite holiday because every other aspect of my life was just boring, but I digress.  Anyway, I waited with bated breath for Halloween every si...