I’m not decorating for Halloween this year. I’m just not. I quit.
And it’s not just because I question the fiscal responsibility of placing rotting vegetables and dead plants in pleasing configurations around my house.
It’s because I could feel myself being sucked inexorably into pumpkin one-upmanship. The gourd wars, if you will.
I would dare to hazard that normal ol’ pumpkins have sufficed to meet our gourd-oriented decorating needs for the last several millennia.
But that’s not enough anymore. Oh no. In the age of Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok and Bric-A-Brac and whatever the fuck else is out there, the pumpkins have to be bigger, stronger, faster.
Weirder.
There’s an orchard near my house that sells things like… this. Big, intimidating piles of vegetable matter that manage to look both enticing and diseased at the same time.
And I want them.
I also want the “ghost” pumpkins because they’re smaller and white, and they give a sort of sophisticated, 1920s black-and-white musical vibe.
Ghost pumpkins, of course, cost more.
The weird pumpkins, of course, cost a lot more.
We didn’t have weird pumpkins when I was growing up. We had normal, round, smooth, orange, All-American pumpkins. We weren’t “decorating” with them. We were enacting a centuries-long family bonding ritual.
After selecting your victims from a field or roadside stand based on stem size, uprightness, and symmetry (this process could take hours), your mom or dad used a big knife to cut off the top and then gutted the insides.
And then they handed you probably that same giant knife to stab out some triangular eyes and a gap-toothed grin.
A small stub of candle was placed inside, it was lit for maybe one night, and then the whole thing got dumped in the trash. Fun!
Now the decorative-gourd industry is raking in millions of dollars while scientists somewhere are trying to make ever bumpier specimens in even weirder colors.
I didn’t even look to see how much the blue ones were. Fuhgeddaboudit.
I always buy my mom a small selection of tiny decorative gourds that she can put in a basket and look at in her living room, as one will.
She still has one that has survived, perfectly intact and un-moldy, since last year.
Maybe that’s why she’s 94 years old. There’s something in the air at her house that has preservative properties.
I need to go over there more often.
I'm not feeling Halloween either this year. Pandemic insanity killed it. People were so bored they put out full graveyard displays on Labor Day in 2020. The pumpkins and gourds are the next step in the never-ending arms race.
Halloween was my favorite holiday. Everyone was drunk, my "costume" was bum and I had a good streak of picking up women on Halloween, but I was usually disappointed when the truth came out the next day, too.
These were college women, and in my later twenties, women in their mid-twenties, and it's unnerving to go to bed with the sexy nurse and wake up the next day surrounded by hundreds of stuffed animals and figurines. and/or tons of religious icons.
In any case, I've turned into the grumpy old drunk who leaves out a bowl of Tums and Aspirin. I still like carving pumpkins, but mainly because I like knife-play (I should've been a surgeon).
Regardless, I'm with you in spirit.