The forecast for this weekend is rain, rain, rain, but that doesn’t mean you can’t celebrate the season.
By Sunday, October will already be two-thirds over, with Halloween almost here. That’s only two weeks before the collective dread of the dead of winter – also Christmas, if you’re into that. We must make the most of the time we have left. Only two weeks to enjoy the last days of October remain, the rain be damned.
Romantic walks through red, yellow and orange-colored trails are out. Soggy corn mazes are a no-go. And as fantastic as a gloomy house would be on a rainy night, personal experience reveals a lot of people “aren’t about that life.” I thought haunted houses were as American as apple pie and constant political furor.
There is really only one remedy for this conundrum, friends: pumpkins.
Buying them, cooking them, carving them, displaying them – pumpkins are the answer.
Should the day prove gloomy and your state after the previous night somewhat foggy, have your snickering, sober-last-night friend drive you over to your preferred one-stop-shop for pumpkins, cider, carving tools and the heaviest, greasiest food you can find. Tylenol and a bucket of gatorade are also recommended, though not required.
When home, draw the shades, put on your favorite seasonal album, movie, or television show – I recommend “Clue” – and take out the pumpkin. It was you, with the butcher knife, in the kitchen.
Display the newly christened jack-o-lantern so it stares into your roommate’s window for optimum effect. You should probably carve a backup for when the drunks stumble by and realize how totally hilarious it would be to kick in the original.
If you were smart and bought multiple pumpkins, you could also make pumpkin pie – the greatest creation known to man – from scratch. Otherwise, gather up those pumpkin seeds and toast them. I have no idea how those taste, but it’s our obligation as residents of the United States to give everything pumpkin-related a shot.