Daily Dose of English 198
Spooky Season
Daily Dose of English 198
Intermediate
Hey, everyone. My name is Ben, and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the script that... You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about spooky season. because we are well into October now, which generally means that spooky season is now, is happening. And I could have talked about it at the beginning, but I forgot. So we're here now. Spooky season is a bit of a cute name that people give to essentially the Halloween season. And it generally is like a month-ish around Halloween. and mostly in October, but it can push over into November depending on especially where you are in the world or your definition of spooky season. So spooky season, the main idea is like things being a little bit more spooky or orange and brown and black fall colors and bats and things like that. It's more of an aesthetic and an idea rather than anything specific. Halloween is a specific holiday or in lots of other countries there are tons and tons of variations of some kind of Halloween celebration in this time of year of about maybe death or spookiness or scary things in general. There's lots of different versions of it around the world. But in the U.S., pretty much the only one that's really celebrated is Halloween. There is also Dia de Muertos, because there's a lot of Mexicans in the U.S., and so it does kind of spill over, right? The Coco, the movie was a humongous hit in the U.S., and it was an American film. And so it's got, connections there, but it's not really celebrated in the same way that it like is here in Mexico where it's actually a big important holiday. And so spooky season generally is connected to Halloween in most people's minds, even though there are more things that could be going on. Halloween isn't necessarily about death or anything like that, but like dead things do generally get brought up into this spooky vibe. Skeletons and ghosts being the core one. We're not here to talk about Halloween yet. We'll talk about that on Halloween. I'll talk more about how it is celebrated in the US. But today I just want to generally talk about spooky season because a lot of people really like this time of year. I can also use it to talk about a general trend, not really a trend. Like a lot of people that I've seen in the US, especially younger they are, have a favorite time of year, have a favorite sort of season or holiday time or whatever it might be. And Halloween is a very high on lots of people's lists, right? The Halloween season is a big one, the Christmas season. There's also just like the general winter is relatively common. I don't know if there's necessarily a thing around that time, Yeah, so there's several different months and things like that, but a lot of these favorite months end up getting pushed towards the end of the year. And I feel like I know a lot of people whose favorite is October into November, that time of year, for the spooky season vibes, for Halloween, going into Thanksgiving, and then eventually Christmas. And so there's a lot of things going on in that time of year, which I think makes it generally engaging, exciting. It's also the time of year that's a lot, a little bit colder for places that have multiple seasons, like actual like seasons of the year. And so, but it's not too cold yet where it's kind of like not fun. And so that fall vibes thing is relatively, oh, I think my cat knocked something over. I'm gonna pause the recording. I'll be right back. All right, I have no idea what that was, but we're back. Yeah, so the fall vibes are a really big core part of this spooky season being so nice because it is nice to be inside and a lot of fall foods or desserts are really nice. So that's also the pumpkin spice season in lots of So yeah, lots of coffee, I don't really like calling them coffee shops, but they're places that sell beverages and drinks that often contain coffee. And so, and that's where you might find things like pumpkin spice lattes or whatever it is. And a lot of people really like that flavor profile, right? The pumpkin flavor, cinnamon, cream, there's a lot of different flavors in there with a lot of things like nutmeg and other spices, cloves are a big one. I do too. Pumpkin pie is one of my favorite desserts ever. I love pumpkin pie. Actually, I should make pumpkin pie. It's kind of hard to find pumpkin puree here, but I can just make it, it's just pumpkins. So you know what, I'm gonna try to make fresh pumpkin pie pretty soon. Because pumpkin pie to me is a very American dessert, especially around this time of year, right? In October, November, that's when pumpkin pie comes out, and it always reminds me of this time of year, and it's always delicious, and... Yeah, so if you have never tried pumpkin pie, I definitely recommend it. It's got a regular pie crust and then the filling is usually made of sort of a custardy pumpkin flavored, it's almost like a cream, but it has things like eggs and cream and sugar and pumpkin puree and a bunch of spices in there. And it creates this really delicious, soft custard really in the middle. And then you often put whipped cream on top. Or vanilla ice cream is more for apple pie, but it can work if you need. But that's my favorite part of spooky season, I will say, just straight up. Pumpkin pie absolutely kills it. It's so good. But then all sorts of other things, right? Apple cider, hot apple cider with cinnamon, apple season as well is right in this time. And so in lots of parts of the US where apples grow really, really well, there are almost apple festivals or big sort of things that go on with apples. I remember going to a, in a local park actually, relatively close to my middle school, Every like basically apple season there was a apple cider just like gathering basically where people there was a couple of big apple cider presses that people had and because making apple cider is not super easy because you have to put a lot of like force into it. And so a lot of people would just get together, hang out, people would bring food and there would be fresh apple cider, hot apple cider, all sorts of delicious things the kids would play in the park. Definitely a fall day activity sort of thing. I'm running out of time though and I haven't really talked about the actual spooky season part of it. And that has to do with the decorations and the kinds of things that people put up. The typical spooky season things are ghosts, skeletons, bats, witches, pumpkins are big, orange and black and white are the colors that are most common. Sometimes you'll also get like fall leaves. So orange, yellow, even red leaves can really look very spooky season like because it's more of like the color palette that gets used. There's probably some grays in there. And putting up things like webs, like fake webs on your wall, decorating your door. It's a very common thing people do in this time of year. Same thing with haunted houses. Haunted houses are this time of year. Lots of people love those. I've never been a person who likes haunted houses or scary movies for really the same reason, is that they don't scare me. And that's the whole point. I actually recently watched the movie Alien, which is a very well-loved, not horror, but like it's a scary movie, but it's not horror in the same way that horror usually is. But I didn't really enjoy the story or any of it, because it's just not scary to me. It doesn't look scary. It looks cool. I really like how it looks. I thought it was really, really well done. It was beautiful. It looks so good. I love how that looks. I like the music but like the story and just isn't scary to me. I've been to some haunted houses and they're just kind of boring to me. I'm just not the kind of person that can get into the the spookiness and like be scared which makes sense because like people that go to a haunted house, they want to be scared. That's like the point, right? If you're going, you're not going to be scared. Like, why would you go? It's like, if you're going to go to a basketball game and then just not watch the basketball game, like what, why would you do that? Um, and so nothing against, um, horror movies, scary movies, any of those things. I think they're there. It's great that they exist. They're just not for me. I would much prefer going to the pumpkin patch. That's a big thing in the US to go to a pumpkin patch and pick out a pumpkin, hang out with your family. Carving pumpkins is also big, but we'll get into that in the Halloween episode because I'm actually out of time for today. So I want to say thank you very much for being here and listening. If you are a spooky season fan, let me know down in the comments below and say what you are doing for this spooky season. But other than that, I will see you again tomorrow for a brand new episode. See you then.
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