Big Fat and Orange!

How does your family find their pumpkins for Halloween? Do you go to Hy-Vee or some other store to pick one out of a crate? Do you go out to a pumpkin patch and roam the field until you find the one perfectly round pumpkin that you just want to carve into? Or do you not get pumpkins at all!? Well until recent years, my family did none of these options.

When I was little, my siblings and I always wanted to get the biggest pumpkins possible for Halloween! If you’re a big Halloween person, then you know that the best way to get the biggest pumpkins is to plant them yourself! So for many years, this is how my family got our pumpkins! When you grow your own pumpkin, you don’t have to worry about paying an arm and a leg for that beautiful 3 foot by 3-foot pumpkin. Also, it’s only a short distance from your house so you don’t have to spend an entire afternoon searching, and you don’t have to carry it very far!

Some other things my family would do for Halloween was to carve our pumpkins together! One night about 2 weeks before Halloween, we would cover our kitchen table with newspapers and crowd around to carve the hardest designs we could imagine! All 6 of us going crazy with our ice cream scoops, giant spoons, and fingers seeing who could gut their pumpkin first! Then we would gather the seeds from the guts of the pumpkin and roast them on the stove with salt! They made a perfect snack for when you’re carving your pumpkin! After we were all finished, we would find the perfect candle to put inside our beautiful jack-o-lantern!

This is what I miss. I miss carving my pumpkins with all of my siblings, and having the biggest pumpkin on the street! I miss seeing 6 jack-o-lanterns sitting on our front step! I miss being together as a family with that healthy competition. These are the things you miss when you’re the youngest and all your siblings are off to far away places for school. This is when you realize how lucky you were to have fun family activities when everyone was around. This is when you realize how great your life was before all your annoying siblings left.