Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

 As someone with a lifelong love of both Valentine's Day and Halloween, it always excites me when the two things combine.  I talk every year (including in my previous post) about how amazing it's been to see "Valloween" really rise to prominence in recent years. And this year, the release of the Valentine's Day slasher film, Heart Eyes seemed to really solidify that. As you can imagine, I was extremely excited about this movie from the get-go. Slasher films are, currently, my most preferred brand of horror for the most part, and add in the Valentine's Day twist? Sounds like a match made in heaven to me. I'm only aware of two other horror films (or I suppose three if you count one remake) that are set on Valentine's Day, and, I don't know, something about the fact that Heart Eyes was born in the age of the online Halloween community, just makes my heart soar. I feel seen. I finally saw the movie on Valentine's Day morning, and I'm thanking m...

    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...

The end of Valentine’s Day has been weighing heavily on my mind. Being my second-favorite holiday, I suppose that’s to be expected…but the truth is, I feel the weight of the end of every  holiday. It doesn't matter if it's a holiday I celebrate or not. It can be a big holiday, like Christmas, or a small one, like Saint Patrick's Day. It can even be a holiday from a different culture, that I may actually know very little about.  For the few days after every holiday, I feel a strange heaviness.  It's never as all-consuming as it is for me immediately after Halloween. Valentine's Day comes somewhat close but, of course, doesn't quite touch it. Still, though... I look at the leftover decorations, the clearance aisles, the social media posts from the previous days, and I feel strangely about it. I think of how painful it is for me, to watch Halloween get torn down, stored away, reduced to a fifty-percent-off pile of candy corn on a grocery store display. On February ...

 It's that time of year again. The time when I, arguably the reigning queen of not living life by a calendar, shocks the world, or at least the online community, by declaring that my second favorite holiday, the only non-Halloween holiday I genuinely care about, is, in fact, Valentine's Day.  If you've followed me long enough, maybe you know this already, but it's become tradition for me to talk about it here each year.  I've loved Valentine's Day as long as I've been alive. My heart would leap as a child, when the stores would start turning pink and red, filled with random stuffed animals and silly puns presented by doe-eyed puppies and kittens, or of-the-moment children's TV and movie stars. Second only to choosing my Halloween costume, was the decision of which Valentines I would hand out in class. I still remember second grade, thinking I'd be the coolest kid in class because everyone was so obsessed with The Lion King and I managed to find Valen...

  It's the weekend after Valentine's Day, and a little girl sits quietly in her bedroom, going through the valentines she received, earlier in the week. Everyone in the class had made a mailbox, and everyone in the class was supposed to give valentines to everyone else. Maybe it was silly. Maybe it was calendar-driven nonsense, but for this little girl, it was special. Valentine's Day wasn't like the days in gym class where the teachers let students choose teams. She would often hear the kids that were chosen before her, whisper to the team captain not to pick her, until she was the last one standing. And Valentine's Day wasn't like when the teacher made everyone pair up for projects, and she'd find herself working alone, or third-wheeling a pair of best friends that she was assigned to when no one would choose her. Valentine's Day was the one day of the school year that everyone had to be included. The one day of the year when all of the cliches about f...

 If you've known me long enough, you know that Valentine's Day is, and pretty much always has been, my second-favorite holiday.  People who don't know me as well, though, are always shocked to find this out...and basically just shocked that there is someone in the world who loves and looks forward to Valentine's Day, in general.  I've honestly never understood the negativity. I mean, I suppose I can see it if you have some sort of awful memory tied to the day, or something along those lines, but to loathe the day just because it exists? It's never really made sense to me. I guess the problem is that most people see it is a holiday only for people in romantic relationships, but my memories of Valentine's Day extend far beyond the relationships I've been in.  The fact that so many people seem to perceive Valentine's Day as being so exclusive, is honestly bizarre to me.  Maybe it's because I grew up a shy, unpopular kid, but to me, growing up, Valen...