There are a million of these in browser images.
You could mix some Halloween candy into the pumpkin guts and seeds to show why it's so sick. Candy wrappers all over the place.
It's a great idea because you're usually careful about cleaning up the inside mess and disposing it, or baking the seeds, but this way you get to use the mess.
A friend of mine, John Gruenzwik, now dead, used to enjoy Halloween quite a lot. He always had some kind of party. He'd invite a house full of people over for drinks and to decorate Halloween cookies. But one year he told me that he would be visiting a woman in a nursing home. Or some kind of upscale group-place for retirees. She lived in her own unit but there was a community area attached. She was widowed. I never met her before. Somehow she was important to him. He told me he intended to go over to where she lived on the other side of town and carve a jack-o-lantern for her.
I told him that I have an idea. He was always open to my ideas. One of the most flexible people I knew. I wanted to go with him and carve a suicide pumpkin. But be amusing about it by using a ridiculous gun.
The pumpkin will have a regular face. Triangular eyes and nose with a snaggletooth smile. But with a plastic ping-pong gun shoved into the side of its head. And the other side blasted out, the chunks pulled out by hand, and with the pumpkin guts spilled out the blasted hole.
At that time the ping-pong ball guns looked like regular guns. Not so today. Nowadays the guns all look stupid.
But these would still work.
We had a lot of fun carving the pumpkin. The pumpkin looked perfectly sinister and ridiculous and brilliant and stupid, terrifying and funny all that same time. We loved it. The woman hated it. And I mean hated it. What a strange and negative reaction. I don't know what her problem was. That joke-suicide pumpkin was her first and lasting impression of me. She hated the pumpkin, she hated the gun, she hated the inner membrane and seeds and the mess, everything was wrong and she strongly disliked me. Because of her negative reaction I must say altogether we had a poor time. Except John thought it was hilarious. Her not liking it and not liking me added to the hilarity for John.
13 comments:
Maybe my granddaughter and I can make a puking pumpkin.
Was there a suicide in her family?
When I hear someone with a million ideas, a hundred different perspectives, and a huge dollop of creativity say "I don't get it" or "I don't know" I wonder what is causing the block and where the ability to apply creative intrigue or seek insight went?
That said, I experience both pumpkin ideas as creative, eye-catching, and clever (I had written cleaver before spell check but a plastic cleaver would work too.
If the original idea was to spend time with someone treasured in a nursing home and let her know she was important and carve a pumpkin with her, then inviting some Halloween memories from her, what she recalled as most fun and most scary, and asking what kind of pumpkin face she'd like to carve might have been more fun for her than the Suicide Pumpkin.
My neighbor put out a big pumpkin with a semi-smile semi-scowl on its face. Hmmmmmmm................
"Never say suicide to an old person." - Aunt Blabby.
Well Aunt Blabby was wrong. Since the old are much happier (okay, there are exceptions) than the young, suicide is much less of a temptation.
woah.
I was searching the interwebz for a photo of a big carved pumpkin eating a little carved pumpkin and I stumbled onto this.
Try again.
I found this.
Puking pumpkin was my son's favorite carve as a teen. He did it a couple years in a row.
Puerile
Based on my mom and dad, I'd say that straight-up talk of death would be more bone rattlingly scary for those nearing it then the mention of suicide unless severe pain was involved. Both my parents wanted more time. On my dad's 80th birthday (he died of an accidental fall two weeks later) he told the gathered family that he'd really like another 80 years, and I think he would have, except for the politics driving him nuts. And my mom at 96, didn't think she was dying anytime soon. I don't believe either would have gone the suicide route. Maybe living through WW2 changed something for them, as they were both into survival.
As I kid, pulling the seeds out with my hands was my favorite part. We kept our candy in a pillowcase under the bed. Why not a drawer? I don't know. Maybe food didn't belong in drawers.
As for puking pumpkin vomit and brain splatters, it's all fun and games until someone has to clean it up. And dried/rotting pumpkin slime is a bugger, requiring a brush or scrubbie.
We kept our candy under our beds. 4 of us and we would barter and trade. All full sized candy back then.
That's one Asian looking pumpkin.
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