Jack o’ Lanterns

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

Halloween is just a week away, and I’ve done most of my usual pre-Halloween stuff, like watch scary movies and buy a bunch of candy, theoretically for trick-or-treaters, but we actually end up eating most of it ourselves — especially since my grandson is old enough to eat a Kit-Kat now.

There’s just one thing left to check off our family Halloween to-do list — Jack o’ Lanterns. Last year, sadly, we did not carve any pumpkins, which I guess makes sense. My older kids are all grown up and living in their own homes and my only one left at home was just months away from graduating fron high school. So, since making Jack o’ Lanterns, much like Easter Egg dyeing, is a younger kids’ sort of thing.

Funny, though, how even with a pair of mid-twenty-somethings Santa Claus hasn’t missed our house since 1996…

See VIEWPOINT, page A6 VIEWPOINT

From page A4

But with the stars aligning, all of our kids are going to be home this weekend, so you know some pumpkins are getting “Jacked” up (shut up, that’s a great pun).

Anyway, I sill have a few scars on my fingers from pumpkin carvings gone wrong back in the day, but I don’t care. Fun fact: For too many years than I’d like to admit, I thought that pumpkin pie was made from all the “guts” that you pull out of the pumpkin before you carve it. How did they transform all those seeds and stringy innards into delicious creamy pumpkin pie? I never could figure that part out.

And yes, I will be chasing my grandson around with aforementioned pumpkin guts…