‘Tis the season to carve pumpkins!

Halloween is only four days away, and there’s a glimmer of spooky magic settling over our neighborhood. Our neighbors have put up their plastic skeletons (and, in our neck of the woods, sometimes this includes plastic flamingo skeletons!) and we’ve purchased our bulk bags of candy. Driving around the edges of the city, one or two more of those huge 12-foot skeletons have cropped up, and it’ll be fun to see which ones are duly taken down after the holiday and which ones remain, gently redecorated to suit whatever time of year it may be, like one near us who dons a Santa hat during the Christmas season. Kids across the nation are prepping their costumes like there’s no tomorrow.

The holidays serve as a way for us to keep track of the passing of time—to mark this passing with moments of specialness, events that offer us a chance to engage with our community and savor some communal celebration. On Halloween night, my daughter and I will hand out candy and watch the Peanuts Halloween special, as is tradition. The Great Pumpkin, who Linus waits for out in his very sincere pumpkin patch, may or may not arrive, and we’ll enjoy our Halloween snacks all the same.

I wanted to use this blog post as an opportunity to share an article with you all! Around this time of year, in these few days leading up to Halloween, my daughter and I will carve our annual Halloween pumpkins. While we usually keep it pretty classic—the standard triangular eyes, the smiling mouth—there are some incredibly creative ways to spice up your pumpkin-carving game. I hope you enjoy this article from Real Simple, which contains an incredible set of inspiring ideas for how to carve your pumpkins!

https://www.realsimple.com/pumpkin-carving-ideas-6751270

Keeping it short and sweet today—we have pumpkins to carve! And maybe this year, we’ll finally see The Great Pumpkin.

Wishing you all a magical Halloween!