at the pumpkin carving party.

Yesterday, we carved pumpkins.  Here’s what I learned.

• It’s good to get the little kids to scoop out the innards.  Their hands fit, and they don’t mind the essential ookiness of pumpkin guts.  (Well, 50% of them don’t mind.  1 out of 2.  The pumpkins got emptied.)

• The pumpkin carving tools sold at the Halloween store are useless.  The plastic awl breaks.  The plastic lever breaks.  The scoops are too small.  The saw must be handled very, very carefully, or it will break.  (You’re not going to hand a tiny saw to a four-year-old anyway.  Go get some real tools!)

• You don’t actually need any creative ability anymore.  There are templates.  Any reasonably persistent and averagely coordinated adult can turn out a jack-o-lantern of amazing artistry.

• You can have daytime pumpkins and nighttime pumpkins.  The daytime pumpkins are like Mr. Potato Heads with foam felt features, all pre-cut with stick-on adhesive.  All you need to do is poke strategic holes in your pumpkin for the insertion of pipe cleaners (now known, for some unfathomable reason, as “chenille”).

• Little kids do better with the daytime pumpkins.  Like I said, you’re not going to hand a tiny saw to a four-year-old.  So, guess who’s really doing the carving?  (Not me.  I put the ears on the pirate and the bubble-gum balloon in the princess’s mouth.  FYI, the self-stick stuff doesn’t stick well to pumpkins.  I suggest Elmer’s Glue as a fall-back position.)

We ended up with a pirate, a princess and a cat in the daytime pumpkin category.  The nighttime baton will be carried by a Frankenstein, a carved cat, and an old-fashioned freestyle jack-o-lantern.

A final word of advice.  If you have free-roaming bunnies, you might want to put the pumpkins on the porch closer to Halloween.

I’m just sayin’.