Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

I don't usually care all that much about Christmas. Sure, I remember the feelings it evoked in childhood, but I made peace long ago with the fact that that can never be again. However, somehow, this year has been very hard. I'm not sure what it is. I suppose it's other factors in my life, things that have already been bringing me down, but I have found myself, this year, getting lost in the memories of my childhood Christmases. The excitement of waiting for Santa Claus, seeing certain relatives, anticipating certain gifts, and the reactions I'd get for gifts I chose myself for my loved ones...and it's not as easy to brush off.  I have said a few times this year, that all I want for Christmas is, well, my Christmas to come back. But it can't, for many reasons. The door has shut and locked on that part of my life, and sadly, there is no key. It's all long gone, never to be seen again except in memories.  This is the most depressed I can ever recall being at Ch...

 I haven't done much blogging this October, as I've been more focused on the annual photo challenge I do over on  Instagram . However, I've recently fallen in love with a new Halloween movie, and felt the need to talk about it.  A week ago, a movie called Carved appeared on Hulu, and I had to watch it ASAP, as I'm always looking for new Halloween-themed media, and this one was actually centered around a pumpkin! It's interesting to me, in a way, that the "pumpkin's revenge" storyline seems like a bit of a gimme, yet it really hasn't been done very often. The only other instance that immediately comes to mind for me is the final segment in Tales Of Halloween. Carved  is, to my knowledge, the first movie to do "pumpkin's revenge" as a full length storyline. And quite frankly, how could a movie about a pumpkin getting revenge on those who have wronged it not become an instant comfort film for me? Carved doesn't necessarily do anythin...

 The December pumpkin is tired. The December pumpkin has been living in fear. A nagging fear since the very dawn of November 1st, as the world around them turned into something they didn’t recognize. Beautiful, natural colors replaced with blinding, manufactured lights. Their brethren rotted, or simply discarded, as men made of snow that has not yet fallen take their place. A forgotten world, that just a short time ago, brought joy to so many. The December pumpkin has been told, for so long now, that their time is up. That they shouldn’t exist in this world beyond October. They’re not needed, unimportant. Just succumb to the rot. Fall in line. Surely a pumpkin existing beyond October should have no identity of its own.  There are, of course, many pumpkins who fall victim to this mentality once October has passed. They rot. They crumble. They roll over to make way for Santa Claus and whatever menagerie of colorful creatures he brings with him. For some, there is no turning back...

 It’s time for another random review of something I didn’t expect to resonate with me! The other day I was having a nostalgia moment (something that happens a lot to me, if you couldn’t tell), and started thinking about one of my favorite book series to read when I was much, much younger. I’m sure most people, especially those who grew up in the 90s like yours ghoully, are aware of  The Babysitters Club. I’ve actually seen it go through many different incarnations in my lifetime, from the original book series, to a short-lived HBO series, to a few spinoff book series, to a movie, to the current Netflix series and graphic novels. It’s something that’s pretty universal. However, my favorite thing to come out of the BSC franchise when I was a child was actually the spinoff book series about BSC founder and president Kristy Thomas’s younger stepsister, Karen Brewer: Babysitters Little Sister. I’m not sure how popular the Little Sister series was, but in my youth, I preferred it to...

 2020 was, most definitely, a strange year. There are many things that happened over the course of the year that I would consider “notable”, in many different ways.  But one of the most interesting things that happened in 2020, was meeting a very special pumpkin on September 29th. As you may or may not know, I work in a grocery store. And, every year, we get a decent amount of pumpkins in, though every year, the variety diminishes a bit. When I first started working, we often had pumpkin wonderlands in the months of September and October. Maybe not as much as the local farms got, but we had many pumpkins of many sizes and colors, some painted, some with hats or fuzzy hair, one year even a giant one that was priced over $300. As the years have gone on, though, the pumpkin selection at work has gotten very basic. Just your typical orange pumpkins, in small, medium, or large. (And, annoyingly, not to be seen again after Halloween. In the old days, we’d have a handful available th...

  Is winter the most hopeless time within the countdown to Halloween? There is definitely a case to be made.  The cold air comes, making everything brittle. The snow falls, and buries beneath it any last remnants of autumn that there may have been. The Christmas decorations, which seem to have been up forever, are still there well past Valentine’s Day, as it’s always too cold or too snow-covered or ice-glazed to go outside and take them down. The lights blink tirelessly, almost as if they, too, have grown weary of being up all this time. The countdown seems to move in a very reluctant way, away from three-hundred days. The days feel like an endless frozen wasteland, as if autumn and Halloween are an entire world away. But Halloween never strays too far from the ones that love and believe in it. As a new patch of pumpkins waits to be born, don’t forget about the ones that are still lingering. Somewhere, out there in the cold, buried within the snow, are the rotting pumpkins who...

 If you follow me on Instagram, you’ve probably seen me post recently about a song I made up as a child.  Though music has never been my strong suit, or even a major interest of mine, like most kids, I went through an “imagining myself as a pop star” phase, and would often make up little songs that would, maybe, one day, end up on my chart-topping debut album.  One such song was something called “The Halloween Flame Is Still Burning”. I have been racking my brain trying to remember all the lyrics since November 1st hit, but alas, I can only remember small bits. The opening line was a solemn declaration: November first, and the day’s gone by… The chorus culminated with: From inside the window of the car I am yearning, ‘cause the Halloween flame on the candle’s still burning! And, of course, the big finale, because what song could ever be complete without it?: …And it burns BRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT!!!!! (Actual Halloween candle from ObscuraHortus on Etsy/Instagram) There’s a ...

 On October third, I stumbled across a very small pumpkin at work.  He was the type of pumpkin my mother would have encouraged me to choose when I was little, or so it seemed at first. My mother always thought anything that would eventually rot away was a waste of money, so my eagerness to purchase pumpkins was not her favorite aspect of my personality. She would point me toward the smaller, and thus less expensive ones. I distinctly remember finding one so tiny at a local farm one year, that the woman running the cash register went and got her manager and asked, “This is considered a pumpkin, right? Not a gourd?” (The really teeny pumpkins, most commonly called Jack Be Little nowadays, were generally referred to as gourds back then, at least around here, perhaps because they were in the same price range as the decorative gourds.) I can still hear her voice, perfectly, in my mind.  When I saw this little pumpkin at work, I was immediately transported back to that day, and...

You are just six years old when your aunt tells you that a being called The Great Pumpkin exists. You wonder why you never hear the other children talk about him. Any magical creature that comes to your home to leave a gift is something worth talking about, right? All the other children always talk about Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny. Since that day when your classmate lost a tooth on the kindergarten pumpkin picking trip, everyone has been comparing how much money the tooth fairy leaves for them after each visit. But no one, not even your older cousin or your neighborhood friends’ older siblings, have ever so much as mentioned The Great Pumpkin. You soon realize, though, that none of the other kids have ever spoken of Halloween the way that you do. They go around asking, at the beginning of the month, what you’re going to be, and maybe talk about candy a little bit after the fact, but that’s it. They don’t get lost in the thought of it, the way that you do. There’s no spark of pure...

No one finds the perfect pumpkin by accident.   Those who love Halloween, and can’t wait for that perfect autumn day in the pumpkin patch, will tell you that that moment, when you find the perfect pumpkin among hundreds of its brothers and sisters, feels like fate. Those who truly know pumpkins, can tell you that it is. We’ve all seen it, those moments when our pumpkins begin to rot. It almost always starts out as a small, soft circle. At first it almost looks like a simple bruise, the kind you’d get from bumping into something, when you’re too busy thinking about something else to really watch where you’re going. For a pumpkin, though, this is often a death sentence. Once these soft spots appear, it’s only a matter of time before the rot progresses. They must, at the very least, be taken outside before they get softer and begin to leak, don’t they? But while these soft spots do often mark the beginning of the end of a pumpkin’s life cycle, hardly anyone thinks to look closer. Ther...

  You hop off the hayride, so excited to be choosing your first real pumpkins of the season.  As a child, you always worried. What if you couldn’t find the right one? Your mother was only going to wait so long for you to make a selection. You didn’t want a pumpkin that was bruised or scratched or soft, or any other kind of imperfect that a pumpkin could be. It had to be just right. Now, though, pumpkin picking is a full experience. It’s not just about the pumpkins that will ride home with you in the end. Sure, you love to see the excited, sometimes envious eyes of the other patrons of the farm on the hayride back; you even instinctively keep your hands on your chosen pumpkins, just in case someone has the thought that they’re perfect enough to steal. But your time in the pumpkin patch is more precious to you, ultimately, than what you will take home. As you walk through the patch, taking care not to trip over vines or disturb the pumpkins that aren’t quite what you’re looking ...

 As the Gregorian month of November has officially come to a close, the final remnants of spooky season, to the layman, will surely be disappearing with it.  I have long thought about the pumpkins that hang around on porches after Halloween’s end. How they stand out in a world that seems to have forgotten Halloween ever was, and wonder what their story is. Have they just been forgotten by those whose homes they inhabit, or is it intentional? Is there someone dwelling in these places that’s at least a little bit like me, and wants to leave some representation of their favorite time of year lying around until it rots away in its own time? And, perhaps this is a silly question, but do the pumpkins know somehow that their moment has ended? As I said, these are things I have often thought about, but I recently was inspired to do even more thinking on the subject. An artist on Instagram,  Everett’s Attic , recently designed these two Christmas pumpkins, named Rotting and Plotti...

 With the way things are in the world this year, things like visiting a pumpkin patch to do some real, genuine pumpkin picking have been difficult.  The farms in my area that I would normally frequent, all require reservations this year, and with my work schedule and life in general, that complicates things. But for some reason, lately, I find my mind drifting to the pumpkin picking days of my early childhood. My mother didn’t like the crowds (or the pricing) at the biggest farm near us, and, being so shy and timid despite my love for Halloween, as a young child I didn’t really have much interest in participating in things like corn mazes and haunted barns. So, my mother would take me to a much smaller farm, closer to home, called L&L Farms.  The building still stands today, but I don’t think it does much business, if any at all. I would love to take some pictures of it, but it’s most definitely private property and the entrance is usually roped off. It’s overgrown, r...