Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: happy
  • Music: Christian Kane, "Making Circles."

It's the most wonderful time of the year...

Last night, as the first rain of the season washed the world clean and gray and filled the air with the smell of ozone and damp leaves, I curled up on the couch, flipped through the channels, and settled, wonderfully, on Halloween II: Kalabar's Revenge, which was airing on the Disney Channel. The first two Halloweentown movies are among my favorite of the Disney Channel Originals (DCOMs), and the second is my favorite of the two, since it spends so much of the movie being about Marnie and Luke and their weird witch/goblin love. (I don't care if they went and canonically hooked Marnie up with a traditionally pretty warlock boy in the third movie. She and Luke are my DCOM OTP.)

There are Pumpkin Spice lattes at Starbucks and Pumpkin Pie Pop-Tarts at Target and pumpkin pancakes at the IHOP. Empty buildings are transformed into sprawling Halloween wonderlands with names like "Spirit" and "Halloween Central." Many of them used to be Borders stores. It's like changing one kind of personal church into another, more transitory, beacon of faith.

I spent the last night of September wandering lost in a vast corn maze, stopping periodically to hug the corn, to bury my face in the leaves and just breath in the sweet green smell of the autumn coming in. If one of the boutique perfume companies could make a perfume that was the exact smell of corn maze at midnight, with the dirt and the green and the ripening corn and the cool night air...I would buy twenty bottles. I would sell my entire current perfume collection if I had to, in order to buy more bottles of that perfect corn maze scent. Because it would be the scent of my soul.

For me, this really is the most wonderful time of the year. This is the time when the air smells right, when the coffee tastes right, and when it's easiest to resist the siren song of things I shouldn't be eating, because those things are everywhere.

October is like coming home.
Tags: good things, so the marilyn, this is halloween
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  • 74 comments
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seanan_mcguire

October 28 2011, 14:46:55 UTC 5 years ago

I'm trying to figure out how to MAKE candy corn sans HFCS. It involves mallow. All the recipes are ultra-old.

tikiera

October 28 2011, 16:45:18 UTC 5 years ago

In the late 80s, early 80s one could get dried mallow in natural food stores.

If you don't need fresh mallow, you might want to look in stores that sell herbs, specifically "tea-quality" herbs or whatever the term is for herbs meant for internal consumption at the time.

I had migraines as a teenager, and didn't really want to take the codeine-based medicines that were prescribed to me as they made me lose too much. This started me looking in herbal recipes, old herbals, and my being my joyous incrediblity at being able to buy dangerous herbs. Though I do have a pennyroyal rant because of it.