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Crafty types got together and the pattern is obvious
By Debbie Farmer
This Halloween my 5-year-old son insisted on having a dinosaur carved onto the side of his pumpkin. Perhaps it's me, but I've noticed that pumpkin carving sure isn't what it used to be. Only a few years ago a respectable jack-o'-lantern had two triangle eyes, a tiny triangle nose, and a jaunty crescent mouth with a crooked tooth. The only complicated part was deciding which pumpkin to take home from the patch.
Recently, however, pumpkin carving has become an art form of its own that requires all the skill and precision of, say, brain surgery. I'm not sure how this happened. It might be because people were tired of looking at the same old jack-o'-lantern year after year. Or, perhaps, it's the result of a marketing conspiracy.
My theory, and frankly I can't get anyone to back this up, is that one day the over-zealous, crafty people of the world got together and started carving things like witches, ghosts and mummies onto the front of pumpkins, while all of the uncrafty people in the world weren't looking. And now you can hardly pass a house on Halloween night without seeing a jack-o'-lantern with intricate artwork on its front.
Since I am the type of person who has trouble cutting a sandwich into two equal parts, you would think that my son would know better than to ask me to carve a dinosaur onto a pumpkin. You would think.
"Don't worry," my friend Julie said. "All you need to do is go to the grocery store and get one of those carving kits with patterns and tools in it."
Of course, this sounded like reasonable advice. But when I went to the store I couldn't find a dinosaur kit anywhere. In fact, I wondered if there was such a thing at all. Either that or all of the unartistic, desperate parents in this town had gotten there before me.
So, instead, I bought a kit for a hunchbacked cat and decided to improvise.
When we got home, my son and I cleaned out the pumpkin and spread out the miniature carving tools on the kitchen table.
Then I scanned the directions, taped the pattern onto the pumpkin, drew a few dinosaur-like spikes onto the tail, and began making pinpoint holes along the pattern with the special poker tool.
I must admit things were going surprisingly well. Then it was time to rip the pattern off the pumpkin and start cutting.
I decided to start at the top and work down--which any fool would know is a better plan for, say, washing windows than carving a dinosaur onto a pumpkin.
I quickly found out, as surprising as this may seem, it is impossible to make any kind of a precision cut with a saw the size of nail file. At first I pushed too hard and nicked off the corner of a spike. Next I pushed too gently and couldn't cut at all. And then, just when I discovered the optimum cutting pressure and thought all of my problems were solved, the saw hit a slick spot, veered off to the left, and chopped off the dinosaur's head.
"Mom, you're not doing it right," my son said.
Granted this set things back a bit, so I did the only thing I could think of: I reattached the head by jabbing a couple of red frilly cocktail toothpicks through it. In fact, this worked so well I used a blue one to reattach the spike and three more yellow ones to reinforce the tail.
As great as this idea had seemed at first, by the time we were finished the pumpkin looked more like a piña colada than a dinosaur.
I held it out to my son anyway, and he considered it silently for a moment.
"Cool," he said finally. "A space alien!"
I just smiled and set it on the front porch. And although we had the most interesting pumpkin on the block, a part of me longed for the good old days back when we had old-fashioned jack-o'-lanterns with triangle eyes and jaunty crescent mouths.
Life was so much simpler then.
Contact Debbie Farmer at ParadigmTSA@familydaze.com. Copies of her new ebook, The Best of Family Daze, can be purchased at her website, www.familydaze.com.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
