Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

This past week, as I've watched the Easter displays in stores disappear, I've felt the heaviness of the end of a holiday, more than I usually do. I don't do much to celebrate Easter anymore...to me it's more of a children's holiday, celebration-wise, what with the egg hunts and Easter Bunny lore and all, but I do feel a great deal of nostalgia when I think about it. This past season was eye-opening for me when it comes to the impression Easter made on me as a child, realizing how many memories I have attached to it, though I doubt it could ever be a favorite holiday ever again, at least in the traditional sense. Was I sad to see it end after the wave of nostalgia it brought me? Of course. But that also doesn't mean that I can't still think about those things now. It's long been established that living life by a calendar is absolutely beneath me.  I've realized, now, though, watching the displays get taken down and torn apart and built back into somet...

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 ...