I grew up in a suburban part of New England, and a major rite of Autumn was to go to a corn maze.
Autumn is unique in that there is no major participatory holiday like the 4th of July or Christmas between Labor Day and Halloween. Many people therefore use Autumn as a sort of minor, extended celebration that ranges from pumpkin patches to apple cider donuts to hay rides. This gets them through the end of October, where they can hang ghouls off the house and dress like a Scary Nurse.
The town I grew up in was not immune to this, so every year would see a bunch of us- sometimes drunk- head out into the farm country to wander through a corn maze. I only say "sometimes drunk" because I was both doing mazes as a child (not drinking) or taking the kids to it (drinking after), which balances out my teens, early twenties and going-with-friends part of my life where one would have to be drunk to go to one.
About half the time, we never finished the maze, backtracking our way out and vowing to whip the maze next year. This happened every time we went after drinking, and a lot of the times where the children wore out easily. I can't actually remember beating the maze, to be honest, although I suppose we probably beat it a few times as children and I just can't remember.
There are corn mazes in every county where I live, and where I live is only semi-rural. I can't imagine how many there must be in somewhere like Iowa. I recall reading that driving through there was basically "corn corn corn Walmart corn corn corn Gas Station corn corn corn Burger King corn corn corn..." They must have mazes everywhere there, and it would be cool to connect them all into an Iowa-sized maze and trap like 3% of America's population there during Tourist Season.
Corn mazes came into vogue in the 1990s, although no one knows who the first genius to try this out was. The idea sprung from the fact that you have to grow acres and acres of corn to make a profit, and the stalks have to be cut down after. Some great human figured out how to make a maze from this, people showed their interest with their pocketbooks and a new tradition emerged. Many farms rely on this part of the year to stay in the black.
With the bleedover into Halloween season, many mazes are also "haunted," and feature various goblins and serial killers. At least one horror movie- Chlidren Of The Corn- is set in a cornfield, and I am probably forgetting others. A corn maze is closely related to a hedge maze, and even an amateurish corn maze somehow looks creepier than the hedge maze at the end of The Shining. That's not easy to do.
They are best as a rural thing, however. Not many people farm these days, and a corn maze is often the only time a lot of people get close to a way of life that almost everyone practiced at one time.
I went to French Farm on SL to check out a SL corn maze. I was not disappointed. The sim is wholly decked out for fall, and I plan to get several articles out of my visit there. I must have took 100 pictures. They did a really nice job with the season, and I advise you to check it out for yourself. I don't know if they are French or just named French.
Their maze is easy to navigate, and has lots of surprises. There are enough dead ends (each with something cool in it) to make it so you have to at least concentrate a bit. I only took pictures of a few things in the maze, leaving the rest for our readers to discover on their own. It doesn't take long to go through, but you can stretch that out by looking everything over real slow. There are other activities on the im to keep you busy if you make it out of the maze.
French Farm must be running this through Halloween, because they have a haunted maze, featuring various spooks and haunts and He Who Walks Behind The Rows. It's more cutesy than terrifying, and is a lot of fun either way. If they are smart, they will run it through Thanksgiving. Harvest Season sort of runs, at least in American imaginations, from the day after Labor Day until the end of November.... even late December, if you throw in Christmas tree farms
Please note that I included a picture of me finishing the maze, just in case you think I cheated my way out or anything.
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