Now maybe it’s me, but I’ve noticed that pumpkin carving sure
isn’t what it used to be, and hasn’t been for a while. Way back in
the 20th century, a respectable Jack O’ Lantern had two triangle
eyes, a tiny triangle nose, and a jaunty crescent mouth with a
crooked tooth. The only complicated part was deciding which pumpkin
to take home from the patch.
Now maybe it’s me, but I’ve noticed that pumpkin carving sure isn’t what it used to be, and hasn’t been for a while. Way back in the 20th century, a respectable Jack O’ Lantern had two triangle eyes, a tiny triangle nose, and a jaunty crescent mouth with a crooked tooth. The only complicated part was deciding which pumpkin to take home from the patch.
Recently, however, pumpkin carving has become an art form of its own that requires all the skill and precision of say, brain surgery. I’m not sure how this happened. It might be because people were tired of looking at the same old Jack O’ Lantern year after year. Or perhaps it’s the result of a marketing conspiracy. But my theory, and frankly I can’t get anyone to back this up, is that one day the overzealous, crafty people of the world got together and started carving things like witches, ghosts, and mummies onto the front of pumpkins while all of the uncrafty people in the world weren’t looking. And now you can hardly pass a house on Halloween night without seeing a Jack O’ Lantern with an intricate work of art on its front.
Several years ago, my then 5-year-old son insisted on having a dinosaur carved onto the side of his pumpkin. The year after that, it was some sort of Pokemon created in a pumpkin. The year after that, I think he was into Scooby-Doo. Now, if I can even get him to carve a pumpkin, he’s generally trying to carve a soccer player into it.
Now, since I am the type of person who has trouble cutting a sandwich into two equal parts, you would think that my son would know better than to ask me to carve any sort of design onto a pumpkin. You would think.
“Don’t worry,” my friend Julie said when I first confronted her with my dilemma. “All you need to do is go to the grocery store and get one of those carving kits with patterns and tools in it.”
Of course this sounded like reasonable advice. But when I went to the store I couldn’t find a dinosaur kit anywhere. In fact, I wondered if there was such a thing at all. Either that or all of the inartistic, desperate parents in this town had gotten there before me.
So instead I bought a kit for a hunchbacked cat and decided to improvise.
When we got home my son and I cleaned out the pumpkin and spread out the miniature carving tools on the kitchen table.
Then I scanned the directions, taped the pattern onto the pumpkin, drew a few dinosaur-like spikes onto the tail, and began making pin point holes along the pattern with the special poker tool.
I must admit things were going surprisingly well. Then it was time to rip the pattern off the pumpkin and start cutting.
I decided to start at the top and work down – which any fool would know is a better plan for, say, washing windows than carving anything onto a pumpkin.
I quickly found out, as surprising as this may seem, it is impossible to make any kind of a precision cut with a saw the size of nail file. At first I pushed too hard and nicked off the corner of a spike. Next I pushed too gently and couldn’t cut at all. And then, just when I discovered the optimum cutting pressure and thought all of my problems were solved, the saw hit a slick spot, veered off to the left, and chopped off the dinosaur’s head.
“Mom, you’re not doing it right,” my son said.
Now granted this set things back a bit, so I did the only thing I could think of: I reattached the head by jabbing a couple of red frilly cocktail toothpicks through it. In fact, this worked so well I used a blue one to reattach the spike and three more yellow ones to reinforce the tail.
As great as this idea had seemed at first, by the time we were finished the pumpkin looked more like a pina colada than a dinosaur.
I held it out to my son anyway, and he considered it silently for a moment.
“Cool,” he finally said. “A space alien!”
I just smiled and set it on the front porch. It actually didn’t look too much out of place among the other houses with pumpkins full of dinosaurs, cats, dogs, trucks and almost everything imaginable. And these days, I worry less and less about what our pumpkin is going to look like, whether it’s odd-looking or ordinary. I mean, who’s going to notice our lowly pumpkin when our neighbors put out bright-colored Halloween lights and giant inflatable ghosts? Which reminds me; I need to go to the store and make sure our Halloween decorations are as gaudy and outlandish as everybody else’s. Call me old-fashioned, but sometimes I long for the good old days when decorating a house for Halloween meant putting out a basic Jack O’ Lantern with triangle eyes and jaunty crescent mouths.
Life was so much simpler back then.
Debbie Farmer is a humorist and a mother holding down the fort in California, and the author of “Don’t Put Lipstick on the Cat.” You can reach her at familydaze@oasisnewsfeatures.
com.
