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With Halloween almost here, kids all around us are getting their pumpkins ready for the spookiest night of the year!  Some still have to be carved, and some await the night when they can be lit up, and take part in the scary evening called Halloween.  All the children are planning their costumes, some even make them as we did when we were kids.  Now-a-days all the stores have them,  and  in some ways they are a little bit disappointing!  Remember when we would plan an outfit for weeks, trying to think of the scariest costume possible, getting the make up ready, the bags or pillowcases ready, and then Mom would insist we put on a coat or jacket?  Well that ruined the everything didn’t it?  Somehow we got through it, and came home with copious amounts of candy that we’d have to hide from our siblings, and parents!

On Sunday, Papa and I went out to visit with two of our grandkids.  When we arrived the kitchen table was covered in brown paper, the pumpkins and carving equipment all around.  They had carefully been punctured in all the right places so the selected picture could be carved into the face of the pumpkin!  The kids did most of it, but when it came to the real detail, they eagerly handed all the tools over to their mother.  You should have seen the look on Mom’s face!  Of course, she knew she’d get to do all the “difficult carving!”  But carving a pumpkin is a messy venture, and does anyone look forward to slimy internal muck, and seeds?  The pictures the kids chose for the faces of their pumpkins were rather interesting, one being a cat, and the other the head of a wolf!  It wasn’t difficult to know who chose the kitty, and who chose an intimidating wolf face!  A girl – 6, and  boy – 8, exactly.   I always wanted to carve a pumpkin with something different from triangular eyes, nose, and jagged teeth in a wide smiley mouth!  Why didn’t I ever think to do that?   As the faces were finished, we all had to admit, they turned out pretty well, even though Mom had to do all the finishing up!  After the carvings were completed, pumpkins cleaned out, and lights put into the insides, they truly were going to add to a  ghoulish Halloween night!

But wait, there’s more!  As we looked around for the large bowl of guts, and seeds from the insides, they were nowhere to be found…….we looked everywhere,  nothing!  Finally, I knocked on my grandsons bedroom door, and upon being told I could enter, there  precisely in the middle of  his big double bed, was the bowl of pumpkin seeds and guts!”  Upon asking him why he had taken the bowl into his room,  he looked at me with eyes that said, “Grandma, don’t you know?”   and replied, “Room fragrance!”  Of course, what could I have been thinking!   Apparently there are more things than I realized for a pumpkin to do than just be scary, and  one of them is to  provide much-needed room fragrance for eight year old boys!