Carving Pumpkins

I decided this year that I really wanted to start creating fun memories and traditions for Halloween time. I love this holiday and yet it seems like year after year it just sneaks up on us and we don't do anything except scramble at the last minute to find costumes and go trick-or-treating.

I remember having such fun memories as a child around Halloween and one of the things I remember most was the SMELLS. I think that smells are the biggest and best way to create lifelong memories, so I tried to think of what kind of tradition we could start that involved some sort of smell. Well, I LOVE the smell of jack-o-lanterns (ya know....kind of a "toasted pumpkin" smell) and since I hadn't made one since I was probably 6 or so, I thought it would be a fun tradition to start with the kids. It turned out to be kind of a lengthy project, so we had to break it into two different nights. It took one night just to cut the lids and "gut" the pumpkins. And then we did the actual carving a week later. Being the inexperienced jack-o-lantern maker that I am, I didn't know how quickly a pumpkin "dies" after being turned into a JOL. So the fact that the actual carving didn't happen until a few days before Halloween turned out to be for the best. They lasted about 5 days (which included Halloween) and then started turning into "grandpa JOL's"....all wrinkly and shriveled. We've been too lazy to get rid of them yet, so they're still on our porch. After having a friend stop by the other day and tell us that they stink (I don't doubt that they're not very appealing to smell up close, but in my defense I think it was something else in the air that she was smelling), but since then I've been self-conscious about them stinkin up the porch...but still too lazy to actually get rid of them......until now. We're discarding them tonight! After all, this whole idea started out as a way to give my kids an opportunity to make memories associated with a smell and I don't want it to end up being a BAD smell. ;)

Here are the finished products: