by Michael Frissore

Created on: October 11, 2009

You know as well as I do that pumpkin carving is silly. It's tantamount to playing with your food, which my mother always warned me not to do. But eventually, one October day, my baby son will come home from school talking about wanting to carve one of these things. I could then go with my instinct and say, Instead, son, let's go kick around the pumpkins on our neighbors' front steps. Or I could just cop to my lack of any skills in the arts and say, Go ask Mommy.

See, I can't even carve a turkey or spread butter on a piece of Wonder bread without destroying it and losing a couple of fingers in the process.. My son's father is a man who was supposed to weld together a table in his junior high shop class and only managed to achieve three quarters of a rectangle. And not without lots of tears. Let me make that clear.

Then in Home Economics I was charged with sewing a stuffed football. By semester's end I had half a football and half a bag of unused cotton.

Then came the science fair. My friends had all types of crazy stuff going on - building working volcanoes, curing cooties - while I sat with four glasses containing various amounts of water, trying to play Row, Row, Row Your Boat.

So carving a pumpkin? Not terribly likely. Even the backward hillbillies at the Christmas tree farm know not to hand me anything sharp. One man's Jack O'Lantern is another man's trip to the emergency room.

And they didn't have enough pumpkins in the patch Linus from Peanuts sat in for the number of times I'd have to start from scratch. We never carved pumpkins on Halloween in my family. We were too busy yelling at each other and getting Grandpa to test the candy for poisons and razor blades. So give me half an hour with a pumpkin and it will look like the Tate-LaBianca Murders in here, if Sharon Tate and the LaBiancas happened to have been pumpkins, which all my research tells me they were not.

Here's what I do on Halloween. In lieu of going through all the work of carving a pumpkin to look like something scary, I set up a table on the front lawn, place a pumpkin on there, and smash it with a mallet a la Gallagher. Oh, the kids love it! I do it with all sorts of fruits. It's a hit with the entire neighborhood.

So for Halloween this year you can carve a pumpkin and put a candle inside of it and say, Look what I did. Or you can have some real fun.

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