WHEN THE MOON COMES OUT

There is a particular kind of darkness that only seems to arrive in October.

The leaves have begun skittering across the ground, the trees are increasingly bare, and darkness itself arrives earlier each evening until suddenly the dog wants outside and you discover that night has beaten you to the backyard.

Then the moon comes up.

A great silver moon rises behind the trees, clouds drift across its face, and somewhere in the distance comes a sound that makes you stop for just a moment and listen.

Awooooooo!

Okay.

Around here, that last part is probably one of the dogs.

But in October?

We reserve the right to wonder.

That is the world we wanted to capture in our October Special Edition Dire Wolf Project™ design.

A massive dire wolf stands upon a rocky outcrop beneath an enormous blue-white full moon, with his head thrown back and his howl disappearing into the October night.

Bats sweep across the moonlit clouds behind him, while fallen maple leaves collect among the rocks below.

Then, down at his feet, a little lantern burns beside a glowing jack-o'-lantern carved with the Dire Wolf Project™ name and our mountains beneath it.

Someone has apparently been here before us.

Whether they are coming back for their pumpkin is another question entirely.

The whole design lives somewhere between autumn and Halloween, where the warm orange glow of the lantern and pumpkin meets the icy blue moonlight overhead.

It is a little eerie, a little mysterious, and just spooky enough for the one month of the year when nobody questions why you have a giant extinct predator howling at the moon across your chest.

Frankly, October has been waiting for this.

YOUR OCTOBER NIGHT UNIFORM

Of course, October presents one practical problem when deciding what to wear.

It cannot make up its mind what temperature it would like to be.

An October afternoon can still be warm enough for a T-shirt, while an evening outside beneath that enormous moon may have you wondering why you left your sweatshirt at home.

Fortunately, we planned accordingly.

Our October Special Edition is available on crew-neck and V-neck T-shirts for warmer autumn days, along with sweatshirts, pullover hoodies, and zip-up hoodies for chilly evenings, pumpkin-patch expeditions, bonfires, late dog walks, and Halloween nights spent answering the door to an endless migration of miniature superheroes.

Our shirts are made from a comfortable cotton/polyester blend and are available in Small, Medium, Large, XL, XXL, and XXXL, with several garment colors to choose from.

That means the difficult decision isn't whether the October design comes on something appropriate for your particular climate.

It is deciding where you are going to wear it.

Perhaps yours will go trick-or-treating with the kids or grandkids, although carrying the candy bucket yourself remains optional.

Perhaps it will wander through a corn maze, visit the pumpkin patch, sit beside a bonfire, accompany the dog on a cold evening walk, or simply spend October making perfectly ordinary trips to the grocery store considerably more interesting.

And unlike a Halloween costume, you don't have to put it away on November 1.

There is something about wolves, moonlight, and autumn that belongs together long after the last trick-or-treater has gone home.

Humans have been telling stories about wolves in the darkness for thousands of years, and although the dire wolf itself disappeared from the earth at the end of the Ice Age, something about that ancient silhouette still feels completely at home beneath a full moon.

Perhaps that is why October fits the Dire Wolf Project™ so beautifully.

For eleven months of the year, putting an enormous howling dire wolf beneath a moon surrounded by bats might require some explanation.

In October, nobody even blinks.

So light the jack-o'-lantern.

Pull on your hoodie.

Take the dog outside beneath the moon.

And if something howls from beyond the trees...

Well.

This is October.

You are allowed to howl back.