Wow, it's been a long time since my last entry. I've been in my October Funk, though, going into hibernation with the advent of cool weather and haunt-disrupted sleep schedules.
I was able to make a much larger nasty dog, which makes the guests get more up-close and personal with the nastiness, so that's fun. Otherwise, the recent couple of real run nights were much the same as first couple.
The Trail is simple this year -- a straight-forward scavenger hunt (which is what the Trail stories and most adventure games reduce to anyway), with some yuckiness and some solid scares tossed in here and there, plus a few festive "rides".
People really seem to be enjoying it, and we have good strong ticket sales as well.
October holds Halloween, my favorite holiday, and it is also the gateway to the holiday season, a special block of time where we take time for family and friends.
Fall is the time when the world begins to die. In most places, the air gets cold, the plants stop growing or actively die back, the leaves fall from the trees leaving only bare branches. Birds fly away, insects burrow out of site.
We have the harvest festivals, where the last of the planted foods are pulled in and stored. Often this is a time of harvesting the livestock as well; there is less food for the animals, so the animals become food themselves what is not not eaten is smoked, jerked, sausaged, and otherwise stored.
Of course, for almost all of us, "harvest season" means absolutely nothing. HEB still stocks all the food we need.
October is the gateway to the season of death, which is perversely also a season of celebrating life. Halloween itself can be seen as a time for acknowledging the dying of the world around us, taking part in it. In some traditions, it was a time when the ancestors were said to be visiting, ghosts walking the earth again, checking in on the families. A time to respect the past. As the world dies, we are closer to those who are already dead.
I think that perhaps Halloween would be a good time to go through personal deaths in preparation for rebirth -- a time to set aside bad habits, or to make peace with enemies. To clear the psyche, to let the leaves fall from our mental trees.
Passing through the Harvest, finding ourselves still alive though everything around us has ground to a stop, we celebrate our own life. In America, November's Thanksgiving is a time to recognize and be thankful for what we have. In my own structure of holidays, it is a time for adopted family; our closest friends.
December brings Christmas, a time for blood lineages. And, of course, gifts. It is also the dead of winter, a time when the cycle starts to edge back towards life. There are still hard months of cold ahead, but there will soon be signs of return.
January marks the European new year and is explicitly a time where we draw a line in the sand and look to how we want to live the next year.
I always feel better about my year when it has a sense of beginning, movement, and the ending and idling implicit in the last quarter of the year. And it is October, with Halloween, that connects me back to the cycle of nature, where I actually feel a part of the world again, if only for a brief moment.