You what?” asked my mother, as if my brother’s fiance had just announced she was funding terrorists, or worse, had called her yard nothing but weeds. She was visibly agitated and I think her hand was trembling.
“We used to paint faces on our pumpkins as kids back in Indiana,” said Holly, a bit sheepishly. “We never carved them!”
A gasp!
To make it worse, my Long Island-born wife chimed in: “We painted ours, too. Carving was too dangerous and the squirrels would just eat them.”
The squirrels would just eat them! What kind of nonsense.
Well, my mother, born and raised in Tampa, was flabbergasted. “You know this is a Northern holiday, and I tried to raise my two boys the right way, and now I find out you Yankees didn’t even carve your pumpkins!”
We thought she might get up and storm out, but she was staying at my house and had nowhere else to go.
Politics won’t get my family fired up. But discussing holidays, especially differences between Northern and Southern holidays, will tear a seam in the Earth to rival the grand canyon.
“Painting faces on pumpkins!”
Not the way we did it at my house. No, we were pumpkin carving fools. My mother has had the same two knives since the 60s, and never once sharpened them. “If I do,” she says, “I’ll just cut my fingers off.”
I never asked if she believed that the finely-honed blades would come to life and run amuck in the house, trying to chop her fingers off, but she might have. As they were, her knives could hardly slice flour. In fact, the blades have gone so dull, it’s impossible to know which side the blade is. When she carves a turkey it ends up looking like ground beef.
“You’re cutting with the butt of the knife,” she will chide, to which I will reply, “Cuts better than the real side.”
It was these two dull, wobbly and geriatric knives that we used to carve our pumpkins as kids. We laid them out on newspaper in the driveway so all the world could watch as we hacked, butchered and tore our way through. The rind on the pumpkins we picked was always thicker than the hull of an aircraft carrier, and the blades hardly made a notch.
I always found it ironic that the dull blades were at least twice as dangerous as sharp ones thanks to all the jabbing motions it required. The knife would careen off the slick pumpkin, sending the blade spiraling at my brother. The only consolation was it couldn’t penetrate toilet paper, so it might just bruise you or poke your eye out. But your fingers would still be there!
We started by drawing elaborate faces on the pumpkin to serve as the guide. You always got it in your head that you could have the most elaborate face, with hundreds of sharp angles and precise curves — maybe even the hair of a werewolf.
But with our knives, we were lucky if we could carve a triangle.
Or worse, we would finally get the knife moving like a saw, following a line around the face, only to realize at the end we had come full circle and cut a monstrous hole. That year we named the pumpkin, “Haunted mouth with halitosis.”
Now all these years later, there I was taking my 9-month-old daughter to the pumpkin stand on King Street and carting home three pumpkins. In a few days I will bring out some newspaper, set us up in the driveway and, with knives so sharp that they can cut your gaze in half, we’ll carve some pumpkins the proper way. The way I learned as a kid in the South. My mother will be so proud, and hopefully we won’t lose any fingers.