From Day of the Dead to Samhain, celebrating autumn is centuries old. Now, I want this to be a moment of magic and connection for my kids

Darker nights are drawing in, there’s a hint of a chill in the air and the supermarket’s seasonal aisles are groaning with spooky paraphernalia. Halloween is coming. Every year about now, I tell myself I’m going to get my hands on a pumpkin and bake a pie like the ones my mum would make with us when we were little.

Halloween wasn’t a huge deal in our house, and neither was baking, but I hold warm memories of helping my mum go through the steps that led us to one delicious latticed pumpkin pie and one ugly jack o’lantern that we would display in the window with pride.

After representing society’s dispossessed, Ponder started a music career in her 40s – then faced miscarriage, anxiety and more. She explains her survival instinct

“You can get everything you dreamed of career-wise, and your life can still crumble, and that is what happened to me,” says US singer-songwriter Danielle Ponder.

Five years ago, and five days before her 40th birthday, Ponder left her job as a public defender – a lawyer for those without the means to pay for one – to pursue music full-time. Ponder’s rich, church-reared voice and resonant music quickly lent themselves to cinematic moments: she wrote and performed the theme song for Apple TV+’s Manhunt and her trip-hop-infused track Roll the Credits has been used by adverts, TV shows and video games. Several comments on the YouTube video come from viewers who searched for it thinking she was Nina Simone. Her debut album, Some of Us Are Brave, came out in 2022 and was warmly received by critics, and she appeared on Seth Meyers’ talkshow. Her gamble had paid off. “But personally,” she says, “it felt like everything around me was falling apart”.