Holiday-Encouraged Knifeplay

Second of three posts regarding Halloween ’07! Enjoy!

Yes, it’s no secret that the main custom associated with Halloween involves the costumes and the begging strangers for candy. We’ve got that down. Hell, I think we even spoke of our attempts to participate in the holiday a few years back while exposing the fact that I have an enormous cranium. Little known reason of why people blog: to point out their own foibles.

However, taking silver on the Hallopodium would be the ancient tradition of carving pumpkins into Jack-o-lanterns. Why? Apparently in the days of yore, it would turn cold right about this time of year. And since friendship has this uncanny ability to make people feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside, the people of the village would often befriend pumpkins for additional companionship. And since a pumpkin is just a pumpkin if it lacks humanesque features, faces were carved into these oversized gourds. Don’t believe me? Fine, you’re entitled to your opinion. But would the dialogue in Cast Away be as believable had Tom Hanks NOT drawn a face on the stupid volleyball? Yeah, didn’t think so.

My first memories of pumpkin carving involved sitting on the back deck with my grandfather. It was an age when I couldn’t be trusted with a knife – actually, I still can’t be trusted with a knife, it’s just that I’m bigger than anyone who used to tell me I couldn’t be trusted with a knife and rather than argue, I just show them my knife. In this childhood scenario, my only job was to pick out the pumpkin. We’d go to the farm. (in places other than Northern Virginia, you actually go out on a tractor ride and pick your own. No need for Holishax.) I really had only one goal in my selection: “ensure my pumpkin dwarfed my sister’s in size, shape, and technical merit.” To this day, I’m undefeated.

When you can’t do the knifing, you can use your limited skill set to your advantage. The one awful part of pumpkin carving involves the cleaning of the interior. I’ve never been a fan of it. It falls along the lines of those stupid party games where the adults blindfold you, shove your hands into a bowl of wet spaghetti and tell you your touching brains. Who came up with that game? I can’t think of a single holiday so special to me that I’d gladly touch a brain in order to celebrate its personal importance.

There’s a reason I didn’t go pre-med.

Once the pumpkin’s insides resemble a brand new basketball, it’s time to cut. When I was a kid, I lacked imagination when it came to vegetable artistry. Eyes? They should totally be triangles! Nose? What if I used a triangle, you know, so that it can match the eyes!!! Mouth? Why not throw some teeth in there, alternating on the upper and lower lip, so that if the pumpkin magically gains the ability to close its mouth there will be no gnashing of teeth. Hey, stranger things have happened. I once saw a movie where a pumpkin turned into a method of transportation.

Crazy.

So what happens now that I’ve got a kid of my own? She clearly can’t be trusted to wield a knife, and they mere sight of pumpkin guts freak her out. Now Katie did a fantastic job of initial interior demolition, so to this day, I don’t have to deal with the stupid innards. But I like to think YAB has if nothing else made me more creative, so I thought for Clara’s 1st Halloween, I’d try and branch out a bit with my craftsmanship. You’ve got to be determined. You’ve got to be dexterous. You’ve got to have more dedication to art than, say, Celtics rookie Glen Davis: (This is in regards to Davis visiting the Sistine Chapel in the preseason, btw.)

“There’s no way I would take six years painting a ceiling. But I guess you do what you’ve got to do, and I just want to commend Michelangelo.”

Now I didn’t take six years, but rather one full episode of Kid Nation. The finished product is below. Behold my talent. (That’s on homage to my earlier works on the left.)