100 Days of Wonder – #31
Ooh getting closer to Halloween itself! Here’s a picture that isn’t from Disney at all and there isn’t even anything Disney related in it. It’s the Window Decorations from my Birmingham flat from October 2022. Our windows at home now look similar! So how does this picture fit in to the 100 Days of Wonder series. Well, in two ways. Disney absolutely inspired the decorations in the flat and what you can’t see in the picture is the Mickey Mouse pumpkin ornament, a little Zero ornament that lights up and a Disney Halloween Wreath on the door. Secondly, the whole flat was very Disney. Basically all my kitchen utensils and plates etc were Disney, my bedding was Disney, my towels, tea towels, soap dispenser… most things really. The flat was a way of capturing the magic and creating a little oasis in an otherwise work dominated space. The point of the flat was so that I could work in Birmingham but it needed to be and mostly was a space where I could also escape work, set my inner child free and feel safe and in my bubble. It worked, it was perfect. And I have been thinking about that a lot as we are getting ready to sell it. It’s been making me think about our attachment to places and the strong emotions they evoke. My head knows that selling the flat is the only sensible play here but it still pulls at my heart strings. It’s hard to articulate why. It’s just a flat after all but in that flat amidst a whole load of craziness I always felt like me and like my world made sense even if nothing else did. That’s worth a lot and that’s what this tiny flat that looked as though the Disney store had exploded in it did for me. I hope it can do it for someone else now, too.

100 Days of Wonder – #30
It’s been another busy Monday and I managed to go for a run so here’s just a short post. Disney has provided lots of inspiration and nudges to be more creative. So over the last few years we have carved pumpkins for Halloween and most have had some sort of Disney theme. I’m not that good at it but Kath is. Here’s a Dopey one she did a few years ago. How brilliant is that!?!
We haven’t carved ours yet this year but we really need to make time. We so often push fun things to ‘later’ or ‘when we have more time’ and that needs to stop. We have time and being creative and having fun is a priority so let’s all pause, step away from work and email and do something fun!
100 Days of Wonder – #29
So, Halloween. So much of Halloween is commercialised nonsense aimed at getting us to buy stuff we don’t need and actually that’s probably how it entered my consciousness really. But I like the dark and the spooky and the other worldly, always have, and Halloween gives me a nice excuse to tap into that and explore what that side of me is and means. I like to think of its origins in Samhain in Celtic pagan culture which marks the end of the harvest season and the start of the darker months. The idea of Samhain or Halloween as a liminal festival where the boundaries between worlds blur speaks to my inner little witch. I suppose we see that closeness to the otherworld reflected in the idea of Halloween as the start of Allhallowtide in the western Christian calendar- a time to remember the dead. I am less keen on the modern interpretation of Halloween as a celebration of horror – because while I am content with a dose of spooky otherworldly magic, I am not and have never been (however hard I tried to pretend as a teenager) a horror fan. Maybe that’s why a Disney Halloween sort of appeals, it allows me to tap into the playfulness and possibilities of other worlds and magic and feed my imagination that keeps asking interesting iterations of ‘what if…?’.


