Preparation “H”

This year during the one weekend in October that my son came home from college, I was away. Usually, we have a weekend where we purposefully go to pick pumpkins in a field near our house, pay approximately a billion dollars for the yuppie privilege of walking down to the muddy field, getting stung by the prickly pumpkin vines, slogging through the dirty, pre-cut orange beauties, painstakingly picking out the perfect ones, traipsing back up the hill to put them back into our car (after having them weighed and paying the aforementioned billion dollars). Then we go home, set up the pumpkins on the Halloween print vinyl tablecloth on the kitchen table, and ponder their size, shape, and our clever, clever carving ideas for each of our pumpkins while listening to Halloween Hits on a continuous loop, before setting to the task.


This year, we had to find another way to do our annual pumpkin carving tradition together.

As any self-respecting mother who still has younger children at home who value family traditions would do, I brought the carving festivities to my son’s dorm room! He’s in the state, so why not?

First, let me say that he agreed to this in theory a few weeks ago. Then, as the reality of Saturday morning hit, he decided…no…maybe I don’t want my family trudging through my dorm room with soon-to-be-rotten squash guts. Sadly for him, my plan and my car were already in motion.

A short two hours later we were all together and picking out pumpkins from a bin at a local farm store. No prickly vines, no billion dollars – just two bucks each! Free petting zoo with various large and small, but all smelly, beasts - another bonus! (Adamant anti-farm daughter fell in love with the baby goats.) Then I had a brilliant idea: instead of further stinking up the dorm room which already bore the incongruous smell of “Moroccan Street Bazaar” and feet, we carved them in the car – all ten of us (five people and five pumpkins)!

What really put the feather in the cap of the event was the inclusion of the Halloween Hits CD which I had the foresight to bring along with all the carving implements and seven trash bags, which, it will surprise none of my friends to learn, were already in my dumpster on wheels car. The CD is special because it causes real horror in Stephen often inspiring him to create great jack-o-lanterns!



Okay. It was a rather a rush job – and it was a bit of a pain in the butt – but we got it done!

And you know what? Each child thanked me in his own turn, for the fun afternoon.


Stephen’s declaration of appreciation was noticeably absent.