Now don’t get me wrong. I find beauty and a number of small pleasures in every season of the year. I relish in the refreshment of a sour-sweet lemonade on a summer’s day. I adore the distinctly pleasurable chill of that first winter breeze, speckled with snowflakes, carrying the promise of a cup of cocoa. I admit not much is better than the perfume of flowers in a field, their petals stretching towards the sun once spring has finally sprung.
That being said, I would sell my soul for the price of one market-to-go mac n’ cheese bite to live in a perpetual fall.
Crunching leaves and crisp air aside, fall is host to the single greatest season of all time. Some of you might read this and think to yourselves, but I thought fall was the season in question? To you I would say, look back to the title of the piece. This is not an ode to fall as a stand-alone, no ma’am. This is an ode to Spooky Season: the single greatest season of year.
This is when I spend my spare time testing out Halloween makeup looks. This is when I make the annual pilgrimage to Target to raid the dollar section, grab every pair of spooky socks I lay my eyes on, remind myself for the fifteenth time I don’t need wine glasses that have things like “Witches Brew” painted on the side, spend 45 minutes in the costume aisle looking for inspiration only to conclude everything is too expensive and that I’ll make my own and of course, purchase yet another soldier for my battalion of Fall Harvest candles.
This is when Freeform plays Hocus Pocus on repeat for 31 days, and not even Winifred Sanderson herself could compel me not to blurt out “I smell children” or “amuck, amuck, amuck!” in sync with the TV every time they come up. This is when The Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack plays on a loop in my mind, with “Kidnap a Sandy Claws” running at the forefront of them all. This is when I spend endless nights on the couch having Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathons instead of doing homework. This is when I re-watch every Disney Halloween movie from my childhood over again, allowing myself to be filled with nostalgia as I work my way from Twitches to the last of the Halloweentowns.
This is when my social media feeds are pouring with spooky memes. Every other gif is Dwight Schrute with a pumpkin on his head, and every other video has “Spooky Scary Skeletons” playing in the background. I’m well aware that being obsessed with spooky season is considered basic, and if I hear one more condescending buzzkill tell me that liking October isn’t a personality trait, I might just explode.
Because the truth is, I love spooky season. It’s that time of the year everyone gets to wild out, get creative and embrace their weird side a little more. Maybe it is basic, and maybe I did write this entire article while sipping on a Pumpkin Spice Latte—you’ll never know—but the sentiment remains. So, if you’re like me and the calendar turning over from September 30th to October 1st really gets you going, sniff some harvest candles, retweet the spooky season memes and watch your Halloween movie of choice unabashedly. The Spirits of Spook won’t judge you, and nor shall I.