Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

  The most amazing thing happened to me, on a Saturday afternoon.  The date was August 30th, just two days before Labor Day; the start of September, and, thankfully, the unofficial (but official, in my book) end of summer.  I wound up at a local toy shop, coming away with some tiny plushies. (Two of them Christmas themed, ironically, as I am working toward finding the magic in all things once more .) As I exited the store, something caught my eye beyond the fence leading to the next residential street.  A very tall pumpkin man seemed to be walking toward a house. My mind snapped back to when I was six years old, the very first time the Great Pumpkin came to visit me. How I'd heard him in the night, a candle rattling around in his head as he did his work, ensuring the happiest of Halloweens for the truest of believers. How special it felt to know I was one of his Chosen.  I'd always hoped to thank him one day. I quietly tiptoed around the fence, out into the narr...

I am six years old. 1993. Halloween is approaching fast. I am filled with wonder; it's my third year of truly understanding it, celebrating it. I am on the phone with my Aunt Trish. She is the reason I started trick-or-treating. The reason I faced my 'fear' of Halloween and was able to embrace it as my own. We're discussing the upcoming holiday, the plans, hoping for no rain as I have been sick the last few weeks.  Somehow I get on the subject of a Barbie doll I saw recently a local store. She's a friend of Barbie I've never seen or heard of before, Kayla. I'm not sure what it is that enchants me so much about her. She's new, she's different, her name is somewhat close to mine...It could be anything, but I want her. I'm not sure why I'm telling my aunt this, maybe a hope that she'll buy her for me. Kids do silly things out of desperation. It feels urgent. Aunt Trish doesn't offer to buy the doll for me, though. However, she tells me t...

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...

 One thing I’m pretty proud of when it comes to this blog, is that it hasn’t just become a collection of hauls. I tried Halloween blogging several years ago (on LiveJournal...) and never felt like I had much to talk about if I wasn’t showing off something I’d recently bought. It actually got to the point where I think I may have been buying things just for the sake of having something to talk about on that blog. That was something I promised myself wasn’t going to happen again, once I had the idea to make a new blog. However, sometimes there are things that you get that you just have to talk about! When I was working on my post about  my childhood belief in the Great Pumpkin , I ran across a decoration I’d never seen before, the  Telco Motionettes Pumpkin Ghost ! This guy literally was the epitome of my childhood vision of the Great Pumpkin, and he instantly became a grail item for me! I took one look at him and suddenly I was the child who couldn’t sleep the night before...

Two years ago today, my life was very different. I was on the brink of a major life transition, and very little made me smile at the time. When Spirit Halloween’s sneak peeks were announced that year, I wasn’t sure how I would feel. I wanted to feel something, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to buy much, having no real idea where my life was headed. At the time, I was worried that my Halloween collecting days might even be over. But, amidst a sea of uncertainty, there was a glimmer of hope that came in the form of an animatronic pumpkin known as the  Pumpkin Patch Prowler .  As I’ve mentioned before, prior to the last couple of years of collecting, I didn’t really have a particular aesthetic goal when it came to what I bought, but one thing I’ve always been certain of, above all else, is that I love pumpkin people. And when I watched the video linked to above, it was like I was looking at a character from one of my best dreams.  I didn’t dare even consider the fact that I c...

Do you believe in the Great Pumpkin? It probably comes as no surprise that I do. Let me take you back too my Pumpkinseed days for a moment. My Aunt Trish, my mother’s younger sister whom I loved and idolized from the cradle, was the person who got me into Halloween. It was her favorite holiday, but she didn’t have children of her own to take trick-or-treating, so when I was old enough, she couldn’t wait to take me. It was our tradition from the time I was four until I turned eighteen, and even after that, we still went out for Halloween walks for several years. We’ll get into more of that another time, but for now I’d like to talk about another Halloween tradition that she started for me: Belief in the Great Pumpkin! I can’t remember exactly what age I was, five or six, I believe, when Aunt Trish and I were having a conversation on the phone shortly before Halloween. Being a little girl, I somehow got onto the subject of a new Barbie doll I really wanted, and Aunt Tris...