Guts

Can I help?

We love holidays around here. Love them. One of my favorites is only days away. The holiday of limitless imagination. Halloween. The biggest part of Halloween is costumes, and don't worry, I'll write a lot about that in the next week or so. We're still sewing this year's crop.
Today I want to talk about pumpkin carving. I find it fantastic that for this one holiday a year, so many people eagerly become amateur sculptures. I can't seem to find a number online for how many pumpkins are carved each year, but the holiday crop is quoted as worth around $100 million. I would be surprised if we spend more than that a year on sculptures produced by actual artists, and here we are carving crude faces that will wilt and rot in a matter of weeks. And we love it. This holiday, more than any other day of the year, causes millions of people to stare at a gourd, and try to figure out how to make it happy, or evil, or sinister or any of the other emotions that it's possible to convey with an orange sphere lit from within. This is probably the greatest collective wave of creative energy that sweeps through our country each year. Honestly, how many of you out there create art, and carved pumpkins are art, at any other time? My dear wife, the typical engineer if ever there was one, is entering a pumpkin carving contest at work. A group of adults sculpting for money. Fascinating.

I'm helping.

 When the middle of October rolled around nine years ago, my first baby was 7 months old. Some people would say that the first Halloween doesn't count. Your baby won't remember it and can't eat the candy anyway, so why bother? Most people do it for the cute costume pictures. Those are ok, but I don't do it for the costume pictures, I do it for the pumpkin carving pictures. My daughter is cute in hundreds, if not thousands of pictures, but in only a select few is she cute while chewing on pumpkin guts.