i guess it takes me the exact same amount of time year after year to extract my camera from my bag when we get to maple acres to buy pumpkins, and to yell "ben! turn around!" because i have taken this picture at least three years in a row now.
maple acres is the place to go for pumpkins -- they have so many different kinds.
pump(kin) it up!!!
this year's jack o'lantern is so big that there was simply no way to get a picture of him in which he did NOT have the window crossbar right in his face!
for the third year running, ben has proven his pumpkin carving skill. he lets me draw the face...
which i copped from my sister's halloween card this year.
more or less.
i like hers better. i wonder what her pumpkin looks like this year. last year she and tom named theirs "bruce". but this is a woman who used to have a lizard named "murray"...
notice in the second picture, how ben takes the piece out of the back of the pumpkin to get the candles in/vent air, rather than mess up the top. this guy has a particularly lovely and large stem. oh, my.
ben looks rather like a j. crew ad this afternoon, on our (fourth!) annual pumpkinfest at maple acres.
Meet Vlad, our official jack-o-lantern for the year 2002. he is modeled from an illustration in the book "the pumpkin giant", one of my alltime favorites. vlad really got the doorbell ringing on halloween. he did the job right.
okay. i'm not the talent tim is when it comes to pumpkin faces, and this doesn't really compare to his marilyn manson pumpkin. i know that. but I KNITTED THE HAT. and this pumpkin is WHITE. a tribute to WZ. (and ben did a much better job at carving than i would have.)
Since it is the time of year when we will start finding and making fantastic pumpkin carvings, I find it necessary to recall what I consider the finest of all-time: Tim's 2000 rendering of the logo of my shortlived and now defunct literary journal, NIGHT RALLY. Wish I had a good picture of his '99 "Marilyn Manson" pumpkin.