Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

  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...

Every year, it amazes me more and more how Halfoween has caught on.  I mention every year, either here or on Instagram or both, how I started calculating the halfway point to Halloween when I was fourteen. It was something I did to make the wait feel less eternal, to know that we were getting somewhere. I had no one to really talk to about it, at the time, but knowing when we were halfway there was a comfort to my always-yearning-for-Halloween soul. Years later, I finally heard the term "Halfoween", thanks to an ad for the tv series iCarly. I googled the term, and found that most people who celebrated (which at the time were mainly bars trying to draw a crowd), considered Halfoween to fall on May 1st.  From that moment on, I did what I could to celebrate it. Even took off work on that day for many years, when my schedule was more flexible, to do whatever I could to make it feel like somewhat of a second Halloween. Movie marathons, photoshoots, cemetery walks...it was strange,...

I believe I was fourteen years old the first time I tried to calculate the halfway point to Halloween. Fourteen  was the year I started to jtruly accept my eternal longing for Halloween as a part of me; a bigger part than I ever allowed myself to acknowledge in such a way before. I can't remember exactly how I did it. I just remember this little purse-sized calendar I'd gotten from a local Hallmark store, full of spooky doodles and quotes and sayings despite the fact that it had a pastel flower on the front and a list of traditional wedding anniversary gifts on the final pages. (I pondered these often. Paper? Clocks? Did anyone abide by this?) That calendar was like me. Outwardly very girly, very much what you'd expect from a basic female of my age, but the inside was full of everything I was afraid to express.  On the first page, like a warning, I'd written I like black cats and bats. Somewhere in the middle, a pair of eyes drawn over the calendar boxes of whichever mo...

  I have never been a fan of the spring and summer months. My interest in warm weather and sunny days has waned over the course of time to the point where it is now virtually non-existant.  And yet, somehow, I feel we are, on some level, entering the “better half” of the year. Last year , I spoke about how I started calculating the halfway point to Halloween as a teenager and eventually came to know the term “Halfoween”, thanks to randomly seeing an ad for the popular TV series (which I think was also recently rebooted), iCarly. For years I tried to find ways to celebrate this milestone day, and though I was mostly alone in it for awhile, I always tried to make it feel special. As time has gone on, I’ve found ways to celebrate Halloween in some capacity literally every day of the year, but there is still is something incredibly special about Halfoween itself. The way the Halloween community has come together to embrace this day truly astounds me. I grew up thinking that it was...