 "Photo: Michael Baldon/The Daily Texan")
Editor’s Note: This is the sixth part in a series about the autumnal obsession with pumpkin.
Crooked eyes and jagged smiles flicker, guarding doorsteps and driveways and beckoning costumed kids for tricks and treats. Dotting Halloween landscapes from Sleepy Hollow to Halloweentown, the jack-o’-lantern remains a constant icon of the holiday — an icon I once forgot, but refuse to let go again.
The cold crept in through my bedroom window, waking me before my alarm could. It was Halloween and the leaves were rattling as the trees held their own against an impending cold front. I lay in bed, thinking not of the middle school math homework I had only half-completed the night before but of the night ahead.
All was perfect except one thing: There was no jack-o’-lantern on our front porch.
The realization struck me hard and cold. It was Halloween morning and my family had not carved a pumpkin. There wasn’t even a pumpkin in the house to carve.
It was the most crucial Halloween preparation; most years, we would even carve two.
Each year, I would pull dripping guts and soaked seeds from the hole at the top of the orange gourd, while “Rugrats” and “Doug” holiday specials aired on the TV. I would draw black lines all over the cold, orange skin. My dad would use a knife to break into the pumpkin with ease, following every line I had drawn.
I was always a fan of the classic design: triangle eyes and a one-or-two toothed smile. My dad frequently branched into the avant-garde, carving out sports team logos to be backlit by a lone candle.
We would save the seeds, and on Halloween night, after hours of filling my bag with candy, I would come home exhausted to the scent of roasting seeds.
But that year, with the wind blowing the leaves outside my window, I knew it was not going to happen. Somehow we had forgotten the one most important tradition. I felt my youth fading. My childhood was one more step behind me.
This year, after a week away from pumpkins, I was ready to return to the beat and get that piece of my childhood back.
Determined, I headed to HEB’s pumpkin patch. I competed with small children who presented pumpkins to their parents with pride. I was set to find one right for carving — one with a smooth, clean surface, round in shape.
With the right pumpkin purchased, three knives of varying shape and size chosen and my table covered with newspaper, I was ready to begin the tradition again.
I drove the biggest of the three knives right in, carving a hole at the top through which I reached in to feel the old, familiar mush. I removed the seeds and set them aside for roasting later.
With a face awkwardly drawn over the grooves of the gourd and the insides all ripped out, the pumpkin was ready. I soon understood why my dad did all the carving. He always made it look like carving butter, but it’s really next to impossible to make anything other than triangles. I have a newfound respect for his Yankees jack-o’-lantern that I once thought to be so ridiculous.
Eventually, the face was carved and the candle was lit and carefully lowered in. A soft glow emitted as I flicked off the light switch. Then, after I set the top back in place, the jack-o’-lantern came to life, wildly flickering orange like I had always remembered. It was finally ready to be set outside where it could greet the world with its crooked, triangle eyes and its jagged, two-toothed smile.
