Forget the candy and costumes and cauldrons. I’m with Linus of Peanuts fame: Halloween is all about the pumpkins. Will I wait through the night in a worthy gourd patch for the mysterious Great Pumpkin to make his annual appearance? Nah, I’ve got other plans…
They say Jack of lantern fame was a real person, doomed to roam the peat bogs of Ireland forever with his flickering turnip lantern after he made a bad deal with the devil. People placed their own ghoulishly-carved gourds—turnips, radishes, potatoes—in the windows or outside their homes to warn him away, along with other nasty spirits on the prowl the night before All Souls Day.
The flickering candles represented souls trapped in Purgatory. Brrr. A scaredy-cat at heart, I prefer the tame, bright orange jacks of my childhood. Plastic shells and battery- operated tea lights? Not the same, in my opinion. It’s the spirit of the pumpkin—the stringy, yellowish guts and melting wax—that holds particular fascination for me. Or maybe it’s just the face.
As a kid each October, I looked forward to those purple mimeographed pages our teachers passed out for us to color (no one knew the ink was just a tad toxic). Sure, there were cats and sometimes the trickier witches where we had to connect the numbers first—but the pumpkins were the ones that got cut out and hung up in class.
My dad, who happened to be named Jack, shared my fascination with grinning gourds. Selecting worthy pumpkins to carve was a ritual for the two of us every year.
Dad was extremely picky about our choices, although our pumpkins always turned out exactly the same. Triangle eyes, circle nose, jagged mouth with missing teeth. I drew the face and Dad did the cutting.
The night before Halloween, my mom fled to the other side of the house while my dad and I gleefully destroyed the kitchen with gloppy pumpkin guts and slimy seeds, not to mention all that test candle wax and smoke. I have no idea what I’m doing in this pre-cell-phone pic. Probably trying to mimic the pumpkin face. Or maybe I was just exhausted.
My dad placed our creations on the stone wall in front of our house. One year, an unlucky pair was attacked by stick-brandishing hooligans in a car. I was as crushed as the pumpkins (and our mailbox) the next morning when I saw the slippery remnants at the bus stop.
The next year, we were more careful. We set the pumpkins on a TV tray on the patio, and I kept vigil by the window after I finished trick or treating. Sadly, our cheerful jacks died a slow, painful death anyway, set on Corelle Ware plates in the kitchen. First, little black dots appeared, and then the sides crumpled, twisting mild expressions into gnarly, evil scowls. At that point, my orange charges simply disappeared, never to be seen again. My mother blamed their abduction on the cleaning person or the dog (note evil canine below).
Halloweens have come and gone, but each year when the scent of chrysanthemums and wet leaves fills the air and the nights fall sooner and colder and darker—even with the harvest moon—it’s time for the true great pumpkins to return. This weekend, the youngest members of our family will carve their first gourds. And we’ll be making pumpkin-oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookies. (Link for basic recipe is clip from Jennifer Garner’s Pretend Cooking Show. I just add the chips).
Slainte, Jack!
Readers, do you carve your pumpkins or enjoy them au naturel (or au plastique?) Also, how do you feel about the new trend of blending donut holes into iced coffee?
Chicks on the Case 
I like to get the small pumpkins to display inside the house. I’ve never heard of that trend with the donut holes but it’s not for me. We don’t get any kids where we live in FL as it’s mostly retirees near us, including us. As kids we weren’t allowed to carve the pumpkins, we used markers on them as my mom cooked them up afterwards for baking cookies, etc.
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Markered pumpkins are great, too! Your mom was smart and practical. (Also…no knives! I wasn’t allowed to touch those.)
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I use little pumpkins as decoration as well. We don’t do sharp knives but those safety knives are a feasible option for kiddos. (Although, truth be told, real artist carving tools work the best.)
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I loved carving pumpkins as a kid! There’s a picture of me and one of my older sisters next to a huge pumpkin my dad must have grown. If it was hollowed out, I could have easily fit inside sitting crisscross applesauce with room to spare. The gloppy guts were so much fun, but the knife part was truly evil! With my own kids, we discovered that carving kit that came with a poker. You poked holes where you wanted to cut, then used their knife to cut along the pokey holes. Easy peasy.
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Never carved a real pumpkin, not that I remember. I do recall painting them one year, either with school or Girl Scouts. Too many pumpkins wound up victims of neighborhood antics for me to do it with my kids.
I’m not a big fan of coffee to start with. Blending donut holes into it? Ick.
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Painting–that’s fun, too! And yup, the fascination with pumpkin smashing endures. Here the (very big) boys send them soaring with medieval-style trabuchets.
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Lisa!!! This is so cool! I LOVE the photos. We never carved pumpkins growing up. It wasn’t part of my parents’ own childhood, so I don’t think they thought of it. We don’t even have pix of ourselves in costumes. I had one but it disappeared. But I did do it with Eliza a couple of times. It was fun!
As to donut holes in coffee, WTAF?! But I don’t drink coffee or eat donut holes, so maybe that’s why it mystifies me.
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Gosh, I didn’t realize how many people didn’t carve jack-o-lanterns! So far, none. My dad grew up on a farm, so maybe that had something to do with it. Around our town, folks usually carved one big pumpkin–or sometimes a large, medium, and small, or a “mom” pumpkin with babies. Luckily, the babies were tough and no fun to smash.
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We carve them! Although we also did school field trips to the local pumpkin patch…
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Actually, as a kid I preferred to drop a cherry bomb into a Jack O’ Lantern…
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Aha! A hooligan! Knew it. (But hey, you’re you today on WordPress, yay!)
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We carve pumpkins as a tradition (now). While growing up, we didn’t really have a tradition. Now and again, we’d make some pumpkin bread or draw/carve a face. My own kids, though, definitely enjoy jack o’ lanterns. Every year, we try to make a different design–we each think of pumpkin designs, vote on one winner, and then make it together! (OK, usually I’m the one who’s supervising or digging out the slimy guts and maybe roasting pumpkin seeds…)
P.S. Count me as a skeptic about those donut holes, but I’m also not a coffee drinker.
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Love the design group effort, Jen! And yeah, we’re not getting many takers on the donut-hole-iced coffee deal. It’s really a thing, though–Dunkin Donuts calls it Ice Spice or something like that (they use pumpkin Munchkins to blend in). It looks like a Frappe but it’s unique. They put another donut hole on top.
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Three cheers to your pumpkin-carving rituals. I remember carving 2 maybe 3 and just the one year of attempting to roast those seeds. And we clearly went to your school of design— triangles and a toothy grin. We certainly never went faux pumpkins! Not for any sense of purity; my mom dedicated the decoration-storage space to our “big three,” Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. It’s probably why I remain committed to the plain, uncut pumpkins.
And what is this you say??!!!?? Coffee with donut holes IN it???!! Abomination!!!
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Oh, and hi Lisa! Thanks for the reminiscences this morning 🙂 Ruth
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Thanks, Ruth! Commenters are starting to show up under their own names now, gradually. There is hope!
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The Big 3! I like that idea, Ruth. It’s funny, other than Christmas my family really didn’t decorate that much. The same few Easter/Halloween/Thanksgiving items came out every year. I don’t think my mom ever bought new ones. The good old days, sigh. Now not a lot of stuff lasts til the next season.
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Au plastique lol! Love it!
Fabulous post, Lisa!! Love the photos and this trip down a haunted memory lane. When my kids were young, we would get really creative with carving templates and kits. Some of them were pretty doggone good!
British boyfriend Ian reports the carving o’ turnips as a lad!
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This year I vote to see a carved turnip, Kathy! (Pleeeeze, Ian?)
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I’ll tryyyyyyy!
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I loved carving pumpkins as a kid. I was never super creative with what I came up with (we’ve discussed how non-artistic I am, right?), but I enjoyed the basic pumpkins we made.
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Your jacks would have been at home with ours, Mark!
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I’ve become quite the pumpkin carving expert as an adult, and my favorite is one I did of our Jack Russell mix, Ziggy some years back, with a terrifying snarl on her face (it’s a photo I took of her playing, which I converted into a pumpkin-carving design via some online app). Very cool!
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Woohoo, Leslie! You need to post another pic of that!
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Ooo, an app to convert pumpkin designs!! Not sure I’m talented enough to pull something like that off, but it sounds like fun.
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Great photos, Lisa! Back in the day we carved pumpkins that we grew. (If they weren’t big enough or pretty, we caved and bought some.) Sometimes my mother cooked the pumpkin for pie or cookie use–I buy the can. Unless grandchildren are around, we decorate with whole pumpkins.
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Growing your own pumpkins–that’s great, Priscilla! I still bake pumpkin pie–but the carving pumpkins are totally different than the pie pumpkins. (I’m also lazy, so the canned kind it is!)
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Sugar pumpkins, yum!
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Priscilla, your family wins for growing your own. (Even if it was a while back.) That’s the cool thing about pumpkin-in-a-can–it tastes exactly the same as the real thing! (Unlike canned cranberries–sorry Ocean Spray lovers.)
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Vickie: my dad worked with us a couple of years, but it was never an every Halloween tradition. An every year tradition for hubs and me is watching scary/Halloween films. I prefer classics with Boris Karloff or Vincent Price or such. Last night we kicked off October with a Dracula movie, starring Lon Chaney Jr.!
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You’re a braver woman than I, Vickie! A glowing jack while you watch those movies, though…I’ve noticed a lot of red-glowing jack o’lanterns lately. Double brr.
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This is a transition year for me. My son just graduated high school and began working as an EMT. He is acting very adult and I doubt he’s going to want to do our usual pumpkin carving & bonfire with burning kerosene soaked rolls of toilet paper stuffed in the pumpkins. Sadly, the spirit of Halloween started fading when I quit drinking 7 years ago and passing out candy felt more like a chore than a party. Now, I fear, it’s died a slow and lingering death. I’ve never had an iced coffee. It just seems wrong.
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