Last Halloween was a sorry affair in The Dollhouse. I have long suffered from a disease known as pumpkin procrastination. Most years, I try to wait to buy a pumpkin until a few days before Halloween. This approach often leaves me searching fruitlessly for a gourd, stopping at every grocery store within an unreasonable radius hoping to find a late shipment. I failed to find a pumpkin of any kind, even the cheesy plastic ones with the lightbulb inside, last year. Before the kiddies came knocking I was reduced to lighting candles in empty spaghetti sauce jars and setting my recyclable lanterns out on the porch. I couldn’t even get the labels completely removed. 

It was downright shameful. 

Now, I’d love to tell you I bought my pumpkin a week ago, that a orange globe of festivity has been waiting in the porch for a date with my carving knife. I could tell you I have had a pumpkin for days, but that would make me a liar. 

I made my annual hail Mary run to Save-On-Foods on the way home from a particularly ghoulish dental appointment this morning. Oops. I really did mean to get going on the pumpkin purchase earlier this year, but old habits are sneaky things. By some miracle of The Great Pumpkin, the nearest grocery store to home had just received three of those giant cardboard bins of carving pumpkins. They were also on sale: two for five bucks. I paid for two of the least crooked models in loose change and returned triumphantly to the dollhouse for a post-dentist nap. 

Tonight, in a reversal of last year’s glass jar travesty, The Electrician and I made a date to carve our pumpkins. My husband is so awesome that he did the goop and scoop part before I got home from work because he knew I would struggle to do it with my bad hands. I don’t know of many other couples who carve gourds on the basement living room couch, but we like being weird. We watched old episodes of The Walking Dead on Netflix, which was less than romantic but definitely appropriate for the occasion. 

After all that cutting and wrestling and swearing, we were victorious. Both of us also have the same number of digits we started with. (There may have been a close call or three). They aren’t the most creative jack-o-lanterns I’ve seen, but they certainly beat the Classico jars from Halloween 2012. It was also fun to share a little project with my favourite person on a weeknight. He’s pretty spectacular. In a feat of pure manliness, he carved some of his pumpkin using an 18v power drill. 

And so, Halloween will be a win around here this year. We’ll talk about the dentist another time: not such a win, sadly.

copyright 2013:  www.bluespeckledpup.com