Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

 I went for a walk tonight. I don't often take walks in the dark, as the streets in my neighborhood are not really built for pedestrians casually strolling after the sun goes down. Sidewalks are minimal, brush is overgrown, there are bumps in the road... But, the October air was simply too delicious this evening to not take advantage of it. And so I set off, on a very small, deliberate journey. I find that Halloween-time hasn't changed a bit since my childhood. There are always the houses that are dark and seem almost sealed shut. My street is a strange array of the bright and the dark. A few houses from home, my path is lit nicely. Then I descend into darkness.  But then, as I pass the little bridge, actually part of a driveway, that reminds me so very much of the bridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, I am suddenly greeted by a burst of light. A voice, a memory, in the back of my head, says, triumphantly: Once you cross that bridge, my friend, the ghost is through; his power ends...

 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...

  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...

 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...

 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...

  I remember the day after Thanksgiving one year, I believe I was twelve or thirteen. I was sitting in my room, and heard noise outside my window. My first thought was that my two neighborhood 'best friends', who had recently decided they enjoyed each other's company far more than mine, were outside playing without me.  I went to my window, wrapping my arms around my corduroy pumpkin and some little turkeys I'd placed around it, and looked out.  I didn't see my supposed friends. In fact, I don't think I saw much of anything at all, as far as the source of the noise was concerned. But, what I did see, was a beautiful, gloomy, autumn afternoon, where a select amount of orange leaves still painted the gray sky.  I'd told myself that year, that perhaps I would feel a little better about Halloween's end if I tried to extend the autumnal feeling by decorating more for Thanksgiving. I'd always hated Thanksgiving, the boring holiday that dared follow Hallowe...

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...

 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) ...

 Since I still can’t stop being inspired by the movie Haunt , (Go watch it if you haven’t yet, and then read my review in the previous post!) I thought it might be interesting to share the story of the one and only time I ever actually visited a haunted attraction. Yes, you read that right. Something relating to horror/Hallloween was a one-and-done for me.  Let me explain. I grew up very close to quite a few of the types of farms that people flock to during the autumn months, for pumpkin picking, apple picking, and spooky good times. Traffic in my area on a fall weekend is an absolute nightmare. But anyway, the biggest and probably most well-known of these farms is a place called Heaven Hill, still known to this day for their annual Great Pumpkin Festival, which, yes, I sometimes still attend as an adult. The first time I went to Heaven Hill, though, was on a kindergarten class trip. We’d spent the prior week learning about types of apples and different kinds of jack o’lantern...

 As an adult who lives a perpetually spooky lifestyle, and whose main hobby is collecting decor and the like, I sometimes forget that there are people out there who go Halloween shopping, solely to find themselves a costume. However, after a trip to Party City and Halloween City, the former of which is still exactly where it's always been since I was six, I started remembering the days when I was none other than that eager little costume shopper.  Party City was the Halloween go-to in my childhood, at least in my area. I can probably count on one hand how many of my costumes over the course of a decade and then some didn't come from there. Long before Spirit Halloween, even before the smaller scale pop-up shops like Halloween Express, Everything Halloween, and Halloween Adventure, Party City was the place to go for all things Halloween. I actually was once asked, if I could go back to any store I visited as a child and experience it exactly as it was, what I would choose, and ...

This is probably due to that one chapter in Karen’s Pumpkin Patch , the children’s book I wasn’t expecting to resonate with me even half as much as it did, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the night before Halloween. In most areas, it’s known as Mischief Night, but I’ve heard it referred to by other names too, such as Devil’s Night, Cabbage Night, and, as it is referred to in my area of northern New Jersey, Goosey Night. (Also worth noting, it’s my mother’s birthday. I asked her to trade me several times throughout my childhood, as a part of me didn’t think she “deserved” a Halloween-related birthday as the holiday meant very little to her.) I long wondered why it was called “Goosey” night. As a young child, I thought that there must be some famous goose that I knew nothing about, that had laid her eggs on a house many years ago, hence the “egging” tradition, but the true explanation seems much more simple: “Goosey” was just a term synonymous with being foolish or flighty ...