A Month of Pumpkin Guest Post | Laurie

 A Month of Pumpkin guest posts continues with Laurie from Junque Rethunque.  Thanks, Laurie!

One of my top 5 “things I love to hate” Halloween moments is digging the nasty seeds and guts out of a pumpkin in the process of creating a Jack-O-Lantern. I was so happy when my daughters were finally old enough to do it themselves. They were all excited until they stuck their hands down into the gourd hole and grabbed their first handful. “Oooooh, no.” said I… “You designed it, you’re cleaning it out.” I’m a Learn By Doing kind of mom. Also, it’s disgusting.

When my brothers and I were kids, our parents made us compete to see whose design would be chosen to be carved into the annual jack-o-lantern. Three kids. One pumpkin. We weren’t throwing money around willy nilly by any means, but how much was a pumpkin in 1980, $1.50?? Surely we could have scraped together enough cash to buy a pumpkin for each of us??? I’m pretty sure our mom just didn’t want to eviscerate any more pumpkins than was absolutely necessary. She was a shrewd woman. And she usually found a creative way to get what she wanted.

My girls survived the guts, and now my son is coming up through the ranks. He’s only 9, so he doesn’t get to handle the pointy objects just yet, but we do go overboard and buy several pumpkins each year. (I know, the baby gets all the special treatment.) This year we trotted over to Dickey Farms in Springdale to check out their pumpkin patch. They sell gourds at the Fayetteville Farmers’ Market and they always have some cool stuff.

It was a beautiful fall day, and the patch was full of awesome stuff. Not just the traditional orange pumpkins, but white ones, warty ones, flat ones, yellow ones, little ones that looked like ghosts… it was a Halloween smorgasbord!

So far, the gourds we found at the patch are only hanging out on the front porch with the mums, but we are still on the hunt for the perfect carving pumpkins. Also, my siblings and I are all successful and fairly competitive adults… maybe mom was onto something…