Halloween is but a short week away. This weekend, the family and I will put the final touches on our home’s ghoulish decorations by partaking in one of my favorite holiday activities; pumpkin carving. Just like Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon, I enjoy taking a knife and carving up a face that will hopefully scare the pants off small children. No Halloween can truly be complete, without first engaging in the ritualistic stabbing, cutting and gutting of an innocent fruit. To accomplish this, a victim must be plucked from a pumpkin patch.
The week prior to Halloween, the family makes a pilgrimage to the nearest farm selling pumpkins. For a good hour or so, we’ll search out the giant, orange mounds for the most perfectly shaped pumpkins, all the while breathing in the inescapable stench of manure and fending off the farmer’s mangy dog from humping my leg. Once we’ve made our selections, I load our pumpkins into the complimentary provided, rusty, wheel-barrow with the half-flat tire and plow my way to the check out line. The pumpkin sales transaction is performed in a small barn, which during the other 11 months of the year, is the primary spot for the farmer’s barnyard animals to eat, mate and poo. While the farmer’s wife/cashier weighs our future jack-o-lanterns, it’s my job to subdue my wife from buying other crap, like dried stalks of corn and giant bails of hay. Why pay for something we can steal from any number of the farm fields we pass on the way home? Then, dizzied by the excitement of the holiday or the fumes from the cow dung, I gladly overpay .75 cents per pound for a fruit, which during the other 11 months of the year, sells for about .03 cents per pound. This is actually quite a deal, considering the extra foodstuffs gained from pumpkin carving.
An ancillary treat from gutting a pumpkin are the bountiful seeds. Unfortunately, modern technology hasn’t devised another method of extricating the seeds, so they must be scooped out by hand. As a man, it’s my job to stick my hand in disgusting places to retrieve objects. This also holds true for toilets, clogged dryer vents and any of the dog’s orifices. Women’s equality ends when the arm must be plunged into something moist or gross. After I remove all the seeds, and my hand is painfully cramped from the violent scraping, my wife preps them for baking. She spreads the seeds out on a baking sheet and lightly dusts them with, oh…about 2 pounds of salt, then cooks the hell out of them. You can tell if they’re done just right by popping a handful in your mouth and chewing. If it feels like your eating the wood chips from your landscaping, they’re perfect. The health benefits from consuming the wad of dry, splintered seed husks are significant. As the coarse mass passes through the digestive tract, especially Mr. Colon, it scrapes and scrubs the walls of your lower intestines clean. Eventually, when Mother Nature calls and it’s time to part ways with your colon-cleansing friend, it may feel like your passing an eagle’s nest but your bowels will thank you.
Pumpkin carving has always been big in our family. In fact, aside from coloring Easter eggs, it’s the only time we covered the kitchen table with newspapers. Times were much simpler back then. Dad issued each of us a pumpkin and a sword. Normally, my parents wouldn’t trust me with a pair of nail clippers for fear I’d lop off a toe but for one day out of the year, they were completely at ease with me jamming a 9 inch blade into pumpkin. The only real decisions I had to make were, “Do I want triangle eyes or do I want really big triangle eyes?” and “Is the beating I’ll get from the old man worth flinging some pumpkin guts in my little sister’s hair?” Such is not the case these days.
Long gone are the basic, triangle eyes, triangle nose and single toothed smile, which was the gold-standard for carved pumpkin faces. Now, kits with books of specialty patterns are all the rage. The selections vary from simple to the extremely ornate. In the past few years, I’ve carved a wolf howling at the moon, a witch whipping up a cauldron of smoky brew and a dancing skeleton. Each year, the carvings get more and more complex. This year, seeing as there’s an upcoming election and I’m feeling quite political, I’ve decided to carve the full likenesses of all 435 members of the House of Representatives, engaged in a conga-line dance around the Jefferson Monument. The carpal tunnel syndrome I’m sure to suffer while poking the necessary 2 million holes will be well worth it. Thankfully, these specialty kits come with their own plastic carving tools.
Over the years, my wife has saved all the different odd-shaped carving instruments and kept them safely in their very own giant Zip-Lock storage bag, marked “Pumpkin Carving Stuff.” They’re made of colorful plastic with dull, rounded metal teeth on the blades, specifically designed not to pierce skin or pumpkin flesh. After using these pieces of crap for an hour or so, your hand will spasm and you’ll scream out, “These things @#*#@* suck!” Then you’ll grab a steak knife or drywall saw from the garage and finish the job. Actually, before we start carving, my wife sets the different tools out neatly on the table. They’re some of the strangest looking hooks, scoops and blades I’ve ever seen. In fact, I’m not sure if the family is about to carve a pumpkin or disembowel Mel Gibson, like they did at the end of “Braveheart.”
As you can tell from my picture at the top of this article, I really do enjoy carving pumpkins. Nothing is more rewarding than creating something to display Halloween night, sure to scare people. I think this year I’ll carve a pumpkin which shows the bottom line of my 401K…now that’s scary!
The week prior to Halloween, the family makes a pilgrimage to the nearest farm selling pumpkins. For a good hour or so, we’ll search out the giant, orange mounds for the most perfectly shaped pumpkins, all the while breathing in the inescapable stench of manure and fending off the farmer’s mangy dog from humping my leg. Once we’ve made our selections, I load our pumpkins into the complimentary provided, rusty, wheel-barrow with the half-flat tire and plow my way to the check out line. The pumpkin sales transaction is performed in a small barn, which during the other 11 months of the year, is the primary spot for the farmer’s barnyard animals to eat, mate and poo. While the farmer’s wife/cashier weighs our future jack-o-lanterns, it’s my job to subdue my wife from buying other crap, like dried stalks of corn and giant bails of hay. Why pay for something we can steal from any number of the farm fields we pass on the way home? Then, dizzied by the excitement of the holiday or the fumes from the cow dung, I gladly overpay .75 cents per pound for a fruit, which during the other 11 months of the year, sells for about .03 cents per pound. This is actually quite a deal, considering the extra foodstuffs gained from pumpkin carving.
An ancillary treat from gutting a pumpkin are the bountiful seeds. Unfortunately, modern technology hasn’t devised another method of extricating the seeds, so they must be scooped out by hand. As a man, it’s my job to stick my hand in disgusting places to retrieve objects. This also holds true for toilets, clogged dryer vents and any of the dog’s orifices. Women’s equality ends when the arm must be plunged into something moist or gross. After I remove all the seeds, and my hand is painfully cramped from the violent scraping, my wife preps them for baking. She spreads the seeds out on a baking sheet and lightly dusts them with, oh…about 2 pounds of salt, then cooks the hell out of them. You can tell if they’re done just right by popping a handful in your mouth and chewing. If it feels like your eating the wood chips from your landscaping, they’re perfect. The health benefits from consuming the wad of dry, splintered seed husks are significant. As the coarse mass passes through the digestive tract, especially Mr. Colon, it scrapes and scrubs the walls of your lower intestines clean. Eventually, when Mother Nature calls and it’s time to part ways with your colon-cleansing friend, it may feel like your passing an eagle’s nest but your bowels will thank you.
Pumpkin carving has always been big in our family. In fact, aside from coloring Easter eggs, it’s the only time we covered the kitchen table with newspapers. Times were much simpler back then. Dad issued each of us a pumpkin and a sword. Normally, my parents wouldn’t trust me with a pair of nail clippers for fear I’d lop off a toe but for one day out of the year, they were completely at ease with me jamming a 9 inch blade into pumpkin. The only real decisions I had to make were, “Do I want triangle eyes or do I want really big triangle eyes?” and “Is the beating I’ll get from the old man worth flinging some pumpkin guts in my little sister’s hair?” Such is not the case these days.
Long gone are the basic, triangle eyes, triangle nose and single toothed smile, which was the gold-standard for carved pumpkin faces. Now, kits with books of specialty patterns are all the rage. The selections vary from simple to the extremely ornate. In the past few years, I’ve carved a wolf howling at the moon, a witch whipping up a cauldron of smoky brew and a dancing skeleton. Each year, the carvings get more and more complex. This year, seeing as there’s an upcoming election and I’m feeling quite political, I’ve decided to carve the full likenesses of all 435 members of the House of Representatives, engaged in a conga-line dance around the Jefferson Monument. The carpal tunnel syndrome I’m sure to suffer while poking the necessary 2 million holes will be well worth it. Thankfully, these specialty kits come with their own plastic carving tools.
Over the years, my wife has saved all the different odd-shaped carving instruments and kept them safely in their very own giant Zip-Lock storage bag, marked “Pumpkin Carving Stuff.” They’re made of colorful plastic with dull, rounded metal teeth on the blades, specifically designed not to pierce skin or pumpkin flesh. After using these pieces of crap for an hour or so, your hand will spasm and you’ll scream out, “These things @#*#@* suck!” Then you’ll grab a steak knife or drywall saw from the garage and finish the job. Actually, before we start carving, my wife sets the different tools out neatly on the table. They’re some of the strangest looking hooks, scoops and blades I’ve ever seen. In fact, I’m not sure if the family is about to carve a pumpkin or disembowel Mel Gibson, like they did at the end of “Braveheart.”
As you can tell from my picture at the top of this article, I really do enjoy carving pumpkins. Nothing is more rewarding than creating something to display Halloween night, sure to scare people. I think this year I’ll carve a pumpkin which shows the bottom line of my 401K…now that’s scary!
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