Fall festivities

It is my firm belief that October is the best month of the year, for several reasons:

1. Birthday festivities, during which yours truly received Tangled and four (4!) varieties of hot chocolate, to the delight of all.

2. Pumpkin patches are very much in season, which include hay mazes (approximately a foot and a half shorter than my husband), wagon rides, wooden backgrounds with face holes for photo opportunities, and pumpkins. (Naturally.)

 3. My family has our traditional Halloween bag dinner. For this dinner, each item of food and silverware is given a code name. Jello is Ectoplasmic Slime, apple juice becomes Liquid Terror, and so forth. Each person receives a paper bag with the code names written on slips of paper. For each course, individuals pull out three slips of paper and have to eat whatever food they get with whatever utensils they get. My sisters and our husbands had our dinner yesterday. I was fortunate enough to get rolls, dessert, and my drink first, but without any utensils. Such is life. Delicious, delicious life.

4. While the Halloween bag dinner is definitely my favorite fall festivity, carving pumpkins has a spot near and dear to my heart. When I was younger, I would help design the face of our jack-o-lantern and my dad would carve it. Once I was old enough to be trusted around sharp objects of torture, I took over the pumpkin carving gig. I devoted hours (literally, hours) to gutting, cleaning, and carving the pumpkin each year. I displayed each pumpkin with pride. And when we lit the jack-o-lantern and used it as a centerpiece for the aforementioned Halloween dinner, I kept a pitcher of water by my side just in case it burst into flames.

So when Jacob and I delayed our visit to the pumpkin patch to the day before Halloween last year and it was rainy and gross and all the pumpkins were molding and we left empty handed after about four minutes, you can understand just why the situation ended in tears. But not this year!

It turns out that Jacob isn't actually a fan of carving pumpkins. (Apparently, neither is the rest of my family. My parents haven't had a carved pumpkin in their homes since I left for college.) But he dutifully cleaned his out and traced the pattern he wanted, and I ended up carving his as well as mine.

And since I'm sure you're all dying to know what I've carved in Halloweens' past, allow me to present a (not necessarily exhaustive) collage of my jack-o-lanterns from 2003ish to now. (Click to zoom in.):

I should point out that the two pictures on the bottom left may or may not have been entirely carved by Cari Dahl. Although I do recall carving our initials onto the pumpkin of The Cheat. Also, patterns were used for all except the pirate and Old Man Stanley, (bottom center).

5. Roasted pumpkin seeds! I may or may not have consumed an entire pumpkin's worth of seeds in the last day and a half. Minus three seeds, which I practically force fed to Jacob so he could "just try them," which he ate whilst grimacing. Eh, more for me!