All the creatures from Halloweentown were sprawled on the front steps of the house in their human disguises, waiting for Marnie and Aggie to return. It was a bright and beautiful Saturday afternoon, and Aggie and Marnie had hustled them out onto the front steps, telling them to wait there, because when they got back they would have a "surprise" for them.
Aggie orange little car pulled into view and parked smoothly in front of the house. Marnie bounded out of the car and began to unload brilliant orange, boxy things from it. It took the Halloweentowners a few seconds to realize that Marnie and Aggie had gone out and purchased pumpkins. There were big ones and little tiny ones and gourd shaped ones and red and white and speckled ones. But most of all, there were vivid orange pumpkins, perfectly formed with sprouting green handles.
En masse, the creatures ran over to help unpack them. There were so many of them it looked like Marnie and Aggie had gone and bought out an entire stand somewhere. Aggie directed them all to the back porch, where they had set up lots of newspapers and pumpkin carving implements. Everyone got their own little space on the porch, with their own little fleet of pumpkins to do whatever they wished with.
Dylan, who had no interest in pumpkins or the carving of them, was raking all the leaves into a large pile, which scattered back to the far corners of the backyard every time Sophie sneezed, which was quite often, as she had a cold. Marnie and the other teenagers were blissfully engaged in scooping the out the viscera of and carving faces into their pumpkins and trading childhood anecdotes. Grandma Aggie was walking around with a big wooden bowl for collecting seeds so that they could roast them later. She also brought out some paint so that they could paint faces on the pumpkins that were too small to carve. Eventually, Mrs. Piper brought out mugs of hot cocoa and towels to wipe their slimy hands off on.
After the grown-ups had gone inside, it deteriorated into a pulp-slinging fight in which everyone got splattered with intensely orange innards and went inside with sticky hands and stained clothes and clotted hair, carrying armfuls of hollowed out pumpkins and laughing. After cleaning up, they watched Halloween shows and scary movies, consumed the entire stash of pumpkin seeds and ate their way through almost five bagfuls of candy.
They day the carved pumpkins was a day none of them ever forgot.
I wrote this one because I carved pumpkins just yesterday, and it was really fun. However, every year, I can never seem to escape unscathed- I end up with yellow fingers for the next two days!