How Halloween Made Me the Pumpkin Queen

Some kids love Halloween because of the candy.

Some love it because they get to stay up late.

I loved it because it was the one day a year when being strange felt like permission instead of a liability.

As a child, Hallowe'en wasn’t just a holiday to me.  It was a small, glowing pocket of safety.  For one night, the things I was drawn to didn’t need justification.  Costumes were encouraged, expected even.  Imagination was encouraged.  Darkness was playful instead of threatening.  Being different wasn’t something to explain; it was the entire point.

I didn’t have to soften myself. I didn’t have to behave.

I could be a witch, a ghost, a creature from a book I loved.  I could put on a costume and step into a version of myself that felt truer than the everyday one.  No one asked why I liked those things. No one told me they were too much, too weird, or too serious.

Five-year-old me very excited about an awesomely carved pumpkin!

Halloween said: Yes. All of that belongs here.

Looking back, I can see how important that was.  Childhood doesn’t always come with language for neurological difference or sensitivity or imagination that runs ahead of social rules.  What it does come with is instinct and the quiet knowledge of where you feel most like yourself.  For me, that place smelled like fallen leaves and candle smoke and sugar.  It looked like pumpkins glowing in the dark.

Halloween gave me a framework for something I didn’t yet know how to name: identity as play, as choice, as reclamation.

So it makes sense, I think, that when someone later tried to use “pumpkin” as an insult, it didn’t land the way they expected.  The word already meant something to me.  It was associated with joy, mischief, survival, and the freedom to be strange on purpose.

Calling myself the Pumpkin Queen wasn’t just a joke.  It was a recognition.  A way of honoring that younger version of myself who waited all year for permission to exist out loud.

Halloween was the first place I learned that transformation could be temporary and still matter.  That you could step into another skin and learn something true.  That darkness didn’t have to be cruel to be powerful. That stories could live in costumes and rituals and shared belief, even if only for a night.

Those lessons followed me into writing.

I write stories that flirt with the uncanny.  I’m drawn to characters who exist at the edges of what’s acceptable.  I like humor mixed with shadow, tenderness braided with defiance.  I like stories that say: you are allowed to be this way.

The Pumpkin Queen isn’t about ruling.  Not really.

She’s about remembering.

Remembering the joy of being unafraid for a moment.

Remembering that weirdness can be a shelter.

Remembering that survival sometimes looks like celebration.

Halloween taught me that identity can be something you choose, not just something you’re assigned. Writing taught me that you can keep choosing it, year after year, page after page.

The pumpkins are still glowing.

Painted by yours truly at HandMod.

The crown still fits.

And I’m still writing my way back to that doorbell-lit night, where being myself felt like magic.