November 4, 2011

Halloween Recap

First of all, I know that this is terribly belated, so you needn’t tell me about it. I know that as far as seasons go, I should probably be focusing my DIY-ing efforts on Christmas things already. After all, there’re only 52 days left until Christmas (are you panicking yet, because I am). However, my Halloween got started a little late this year and therefor I am going to continue to celebrate it a little later than usual. In short, I want to wring all the Halloweeniness out of this time of year that I can. So I am going to do odd things, like tell you about our pumpkins this year even though it’s about a week too late, and I am going to keep my Nightmare Before Christmas decorations up (there’s that word again, dammit), and I am going to continue to munch Halloween candy until I just can’t stand it anymore. It’s the only way to keep myself from feeling ripped off.

Anyhow.

Denny and I did not get around to carving (or buying, for that matter) pumpkins until around 6pm on October 30th. This means that we had to cram all of our pumpkin carving merriment into a few hours, after having been stuck in a car all day (we’d just got back from Oregon) and with early mornings ahead of us (work and school, respectively). Despite that, we had an excellent time. I, especially, had been looking forward to having a real place to put pumpkins (apartments just aren’t good places for them) and expecting a visit from some real trick-or-treaters!

So after making a trip to Safeway and picking through the last dozen large pumpkins available, we (meaning, I) added some gourds and a mini-pumpkin to our collection and we proceeded to head home. Once there, we immediately set the mood for a party. This, of course, means pizza, beer, and covering the dining room table with cardboard and newspapers (what? Isn’t that how all good parties begin?). Well, regardless, it allowed me to snap this adorable pic, so I think it was a success.


Cute, huh? But I digress. Perhaps what you really want to see is our pumpkins before we carved them? Fine. I’ve got that, too.

Less cute, but still pertinent, I suppose. Alright, so we’re as far as pizza in the oven, pumpkins waiting to be carved, football in the background…where does that leave us? Oh, right! To gutting, of course. Well, it should be no surprise to anyone that Denny is the resident pumpkin gutter. First of all, he’s way faster than I am and secondly…well, this is kind of embarrassing, but pumpkin guts…I think I’m allergic to them. And that’s not just a way to get out of doing the dirty work, either! Seriously. My hands get red and itchy and swell up. Not pretty. Which is why my loving husband takes over and ends up doing this for about twenty minutes prior to any carving fun:
The next portion of the night, of course, included the aforementioned carving fun.

This Halloween, for some reason, seemed like a really good one as far as designs went (and I don’t just mean mine). My mom and baby brother, for example, did some incredible pumpkins this year. Very gory and a little nauseating, albeit, but still incredible. ;) Ours were a bit less complex than theirs, but they still turned out pretty good, I think. Oh! Speaking of which, the tools that I bought this year came with a little book of pre-made pumpkin designs and check it out…
Oh, yeah. That’s right. “Haunted Hizzle.” Forizzle. Yo. Uh…I think I’ve exhausted my Snoop Dog slang, so I’ll go back to plain ol’ Ashley English…
Ahem. So, by the end of the night, this is what we had on the pumpkin front…



As you can see by the obvious labels in creepy fonts, the one on the left is mine, the one in the middle is Denny’s, and the one on the right was a joint effort (it was also the crowd favorite, surprisingly). And what did you think of our Ghoulish Gourd Group? I got this idea (and the vampire teeth) from my Mommy (thanks, Mumsy!), but the idea to put them in weird little gourds was my idea—one that I might’ve reconsidered if I had known how tough gourds are to carve, by the way. Which is why these gourds are still full of guts and have only slits and divots for eyes (and even some Sharpie for the ghoul in the center).
However, I fixed their lack of inner-candle-ness by simply sitting a candle next to them on Halloween, which ended up being pretty cool actually.

They remind me of trying to scare each other with flashlight faces around the campfire…Sigh. Those were the good old days.
Oh, and for everyone who’s wondering why the heck my pumpkin looks so constipated in that first picture, well, let’s just say that I didn’t want to do the full effect on my dinner table. So the next night when I put him out, I lifted him up onto a paving stone, got out my saved baggie of guts…

And, VOILA! A very disgusting pukey pumpkin!

I even had a little coming out of his nose (which is the true measure of sickness, by the way—you haven’t been really sick until you’ve had it come out of your nose).  I think I got a few dirty looks from some of the parents, but I thought it was funny anyway. :)
So, there you have it: my lovely, rambling rendition of our first carving at the new house. It makes me wish that pumpkins were available all year round, because I could totally see myself doing this whole thing about once a month without tiring of it. Hmmm…maybe we could carve something else in the non-pumpkin months? Pineapples? Cantaloupes? ...Kiwis? Ok. Probably not kiwis.

PS: I'm having trouble with the Blogger program and so this post may look oddly formatted. I promise I'll figure out how to fix it ASAP! -A

3 comments:

  1. This makes me glad that I am not the only adult human being who is stupidly excited about pumpkin carving and general Halloweeny goodness :) Our pumpkins are still on the stoop and will be until their eventual deaths force me to move them!

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  2. @Amanda - I never throw them away. I can't. I just wait and wait and eventually I come home from work one day and they're gone. Denny does it for me. :) PS: Still waiting for a cute Spidey pic.

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  3. Oh yeah! I will do it in the morning because I don't wanna wake you up with it :)

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