Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

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...

Christmas lingers, like a stain that won't wash out. The party is over, yet all the evidence of it remains.  No one questions whether or not it happened. The signs of it are everywhere. The word is on everyone's tongues, the decorations remain, the music still blares. Three days later and it looks like it's still coming. The world is still so jovial. Christmas is not celebrated for a single day. It goes on, allowing each individual to decide when it is over. As if the universe itself is refusing to let it go. As I stare at the Christmas wonderland still built up around me on December 28th, I think only about Halloween. I think about how quickly Halloween disappears. How quickly it's packed up again come November 1st morning. As if people are embarrassed to admit that they enjoy it, that they even celebrate it in the first place. Christmas is treated like a prestigious trophy, while Halloween is treated like an undergarment left out on a clothesline. Get it away. Get it ...

 I am still going on post-Halloween depression walks on Christmas Eve. I am always looking for the remnants of Halloween. Not just the forgotten decorations, or the pumpkins still fighting for their place in this world, but also the feelings. The dead leaves. The memories. The smell in the air. The ghost that whispers to me, You didn’t dream it.   It’s so easy to get lost in Christmas, whether you enjoy it or not. I think I do it, too, albeit briefly, but it’s impossible not to when it suffocates the world for so long. This afternoon I found myself watching some Christmas-themed films from my youth, trying to feel something. It’s beaten so far into our heads that we’re supposed to feel something this time of year, that we have to. I lose myself to the desperation and depression. I lose myself to the memories of a childhood that will never return, to feelings I can’t and won’t get back. December is like a funeral…for childhood, for autumn, for different variations of myself. It...

 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...

 2023 has been an interesting year for Halloween-themed/set horror. Several notable movies were released this year and I hope to get around to talking about them all here, when I eventually have the time. However, one particular movie has truly stuck out to me this year:  A movie called Cobweb. You can view the trailer  here . Cobweb is the story of a young boy named Peter, who lives with his very eccentric, very tightly wound parents, Carol and Mark. Peter is bullied in school and seems to always be tense at home, until one night when he begins to hear a strange tapping on his bedroom wall. Peter becomes obsessed with figuring out the source of the tapping, while his parents seem a strange mixture of unbothered and terrified. Soon the source of the tapping begins whispering to Peter, though, offering the friendship that Peter so desperately craves within his lonely existence. At school, Peter meets a new substitute teacher, Miss Devine, who takes a special interest in Pe...

 November 1st used to be my least favorite day of the year. It's painful, still, but in a different way than it used to be. It is both a funeral and a celebration of life. A day of reflection, and some kind of triumph, to see myself and the remaining Halloween decorations still standing. It's difficult, but a strange kind of difficult. I'm coming to realize that the actual hardest day of the year for me, might in fact be the day after Thanksgiving. I believe I have said this over the course of multiple years: Thanksgiving is the final breath of autumn. I held onto it in childhood, despite my dislike of it then, because the pumpkins and scarecrows, and sometimes, still, the ghosts and bats and spiders and whatever else, would often hold on through then. Autumn lingered, though grayer and more bitter, more brittle, but it was still there, through Thanksgiving Day. The world has evolved in the strangest of ways...I have watched Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas compete wi...

Something I find interesting, as we head into the "holiday" season, is how society in general tends to view Valentine's Day as some sort of manufactured obligation. All through January and early February, you just hear constantly about how the things meant to be expressed on February 14th, should be expressed freely any other day of the year. And yes, despite the fact that Valentine's Day is and always has been my second favorite holiday, it's a valid point. No calendar date should dictate when we show love and appreciation to anyone in our lives. It should just simply be done.  Something I've come to notice, though, probably heavily due to working in retail as long as I have, is that, despite their insistence on celebrating, people treat the holidays like some sort of awful obligation. This time of year brings out the worst in people rather than the best. And it just leaves me wondering, why do it, then? I do understand the importance of tradition, to an exte...