It’s Fall Y’All! Pumpkin Spice EVERYTHING!

A few weeks ago, I rounded the corner in an aisle of Pavilions and walked into an orange wall that stopped me in my still-summer, flip flop-footed tracks: pumpkin spice marinara sauce! (WTF?) And there were the usual autumnal hits: pumpkin spice coffee, pumpkin spice cookies, pumpkin spice breads, pumpkin spiced pumpkin spice.

Also not far from all these pumpkin spiced goodies we didn’t know we needed—all the decorative gourds that Earth can bear: green ones, “Cinderella” ones, white ones, classic Charlie Brown orange ones, even the pockmarked ones sharing center stage.

Fuck yeah, y’all! It’s fucking fall!!!

Okay, why all the f-bombs on a chill Sunday after a relaxing morning swim in my L.A. pool because L.A. pools stay open after Labor Day?

Well, given the onslaught of political chaos that is currently America, the presence of this pumpkin spiced capitalist bullshit is the orange life raft I need. I went to Whole Foods yesterday. (Yes, you can be anti-oligarchy and still shop at oligarchy places because you’re a single lady on one paycheck and Whole Foods is actually the closest grocery store, and for whatever reason, the 365 brand is inexplicably cheaper than Pavilions.) The Whole Foods autumn food tower is next level, with the usual pumpkin spiced stuff but something I have never witnessed before, and I am a well-traveled person: candy corn coffee creamer.

This is what 2025 has brought us: chaos and candy corn coffee creamer.

I didn’t look at the list of ingredients in this creamer because, well, I was scared, in the same way I’m now scared of news headlines.

Oddly, pumpkin spice season is offering a surprising orange, cinnamon-scented respite. Moreover, the origin story of pumpkin spice season is odd and a uniquely American cultural phenomena. You don’t visit Japan or Nepal or France or Mexico and see these countries go batshit for pumpkin spiced everything as soon as late August arrives. Nope. Like jazz, baseball, greasy spoon diners, and brutal bipartisanship, pumpkin spice is All American.

Many of us predate pumpkin spice season and remember a time when fall was when you simply drank cider, maybe got a pumpkin from a grocery store the week before Halloween, and maybe went trick-or-treating or attended costume parties and then by November 1st, it was over. That was it.

So here’s a brief timeline of how pumpkin spice season came to be for those not yet in the know, and how, in late summer of August 2025, facing a column of glass jars of pumpkin spice marinara sauce, I felt rescued by reassurance.

In 1934, McCormick & Company introduced a pumpkin spice medley consisting mostly of cinnamon and nutmeg, and a few years later, canned pumpkin appeared on store shelves.

And then not much happens pumpkin spice-wise for the rest of the 20th century, but then fast forward to 2003 when Starbucks invents the pumpkin spice craze.

You read that right.

The place where you get your Frappuccino or Peppermint Mocha is the brains behind All Things Pumpkin Spice. Actually, Starbucks didn’t set out to start a craze; the team in the Liquid Lab needed something catchy for the fall lineup and they brilliantly tapped into an autumnal vibe meant to evoke nostalgia and warmth. In essence, Starbucks sells coziness.

I always found this part interesting since I couldn’t recall once feeling nostalgic for pumpkin spice anything even when Starbucks placed pumpkin spice nostalgia directly in front of me. Pumpkin spice was not what was happening in the mustard-and-avocado 70s’ decorated kitchen when I was growing up—but for whatever reason the idea of Starbucks’ pumpkin spice concoctions tapped into my personal memories of fall in Upstate New York: chilly nights, heavier sweaters, actual pumpkins on doorsteps, so bravo, Starbucks! Absolutely brilliant marketing.

Within the first decade of the 21st century, pumpkin spice momentum hit stratospheric levels, and fall became an unequivocally ALL OUT THING. In 2009, McSweeney’s published the battlecry and love letter for All Things Gourd-tastic, and the obsession with fall things kept going! Gourds of all shapes and sizes had somehow achieved a cultural status alongside all the Western, Christian stuff marketed to us: Christmas trees, Valentine hearts, Easter eggs and bunnies. (Interestingly, when I was in Macau in October 2017, there were paper rabbits adorning the streets everywhere, and I learned rabbits are a popular fall symbol in parts of Asia, representing abundance during the harvest).

No joke: my neighbor had a gourd wreath on her door hours after Labor Day weekend was over. Americans take gourd decorating very seriously. Before the shock of candy corn coffee creamer, I was browsing the pumpkin bins and found myself overthinking my choices: this one had nice even orange stripes, this one had a crooked stem, this one was a bit flat on one side. Yep. I went there because obsessing about gourd decor is easier on the emotional and cognitive bandwidth right now. Obsessing about gourd decor is the new self-care.

Also, you’re not imagining things: pumpkin spice season does start earlier each year, now overlapping with beach season and back-to-school season, with pumpkin spice marinara somehow gaining a foothold in August, what should be treasured vacation time.

I used to mock this pumpkin spice crap because life was easier back then and democracy was somewhat reliable (or maybe I was just taking it for granted, I don’t know) and hanging overpriced gourds on one’s door seemed silly. During simpler times I couldn’t appreciate simple (corporate-driven) pleasures.

And now? Now, I’m shimmying between rainbow bins of gourds and stacks of weird, seasonal foods, and I am bursting with relief and gratitude. Chasing the dream at 50 in LA LA Land means holding on to civility and touchstones you didn’t know would become touchstones because they gained an unexpected significance during so much loss. “There’s still this!” I tell myself. There’s still this bizarre, Cucurbitaceae madness that is both sacrificial and festive. Masked agents randomly grab Latino workers off the streets. Federal funding for public services has been decimated. People live paycheck to paycheck–still. Elizabeth Gilbert’s saccharine narcissism and its echo chamber clickbait are everywhere, especially here on Substack. Free speech is under constant threat. And yet in the face of injustice and instability, despite the relentlessness of the attention economy, seasons quietly do what seasons have always done, changing on time, indifferent to the mistakes we make here on the ground. The fall equinox arrives whether we have our shit together or not, and amidst this rust-and-ginger tinted disorder that has sadly become quotidian, cartons of candy corn coffee creamer offer some artificial sweetness against life’s harsh unpredictabilities.

P.S. Weekdays are for NPR and KCRW, and weekends are for music, so I was beyond thrilled when the new Buckingham Nicks album dropped this past Friday, songs that are either my age or older now part of the algorithm. I haven’t broken out the Stevie Nicks shawls yet to dance (who is witchy AF in all the cool ways), but my favorite track is “Long Distance Winner.” We all know that Nicks and Buckingham commodified their love spats, and god bless them for it! If you’re going to share a sound booth and a stage with someone who both turns you on and pisses you off, why not pad your bank account doing it? “Long Distance Winner” is about that artistic and romantic tension, the struggles with perfectionism, opening with the beautiful line, “Sunflowers and your face fascinate me.”

Happy Equinox, friends. Power up with some candy corn coffee creamer and go dance. Get your gourd on. Get witchy. Be kind.