Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

  My inner child's insistence at embracing Christmas has proven fruitful this year.  I will never love another holiday like I love Halloween. I never have, even as a child waiting for Santa Claus. It's a nice feeling, but never the same.  After plans to take pictures at a nearby farm fell through this afternoon, I decide to go for a walk instead. A short one, as it gets dark early now, and somehow I don't feel nearly as safe as I did when I wandered the neighborhood after dark in October. It's funny how you can feel like you're in a spooky movie, but still feel safer, more at home, than on the most benign of days.  I snap a picture of the landscape before me; a part of the neighborhood that I remember taking a few pictures of in October, and suddenly I feel so far away from those days.   I remember looking at this same stretch of street, longing to get lost, to find the portal that would trap me in a time loop where October never had to end. And yet...it ended. ...

 Sometimes I truly feel like this is the hardest point on the road back to Halloween. I spend November mourning, and soaking up what is left of autumn. The remnants of Halloween still linger, though not as much as I wish that they would. December brings the inevitable start of Christmas, despite that fact that many have been locked in since the second the clock struck midnight on November 1st. It becomes my battle, in a way, to keep Halloween alive when everyone is so distracted. To be a voice for those of us who, maybe, don't find Christmas time quite as merry. I am a safe space, not only for myself, but to the others that need Halloween as much as I do.  It's hard not to get distracted. As December descends into its final week before the supposed "big day", I get lost in nostalgia. I don't, necessarily, want to fall down the Christmas rabbit hole, the way Jack Skellington did, but I think about it. And the thought, the memory, becomes all-consuming for a few day...

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 ...