We carved our pumpkins last night. I spent three hours sorting through pumpkin guts, extracting the seeds for toasting (and they turned out yummy). Meanwhile, Sir Monkeypants spent his time making this beautiful but aggravating Thomas The Tank Engine jack o’lantern:

Now that is the very definition of a man who loves his son.

And speaking of fathers…

Carving pumpkins reminds me of my dad.

I don’t have very many father-related memories from growing up; he was away a lot and missed many of our major life events. But I do remember him being home for every Halloween. My mom would send us down to the basement with four pumpkins and our dad, and we’d bug the crap out of him, circling and circling, asking if the pumpkins were ready for carving and telling him exactly how to do everything. He was fairly patient with us, though, and let us design our own, doing his best to carve out any pattern we wanted. We’d do the seed sorting while he put our chosen faces, silly or mad or scary, onto our pumpkins. Then he’d display them proudly on our porch. It was a whole day of dad time, quite rare in my youth.

Even now, every Halloween, my mom pulls out the family legend of that time that hooligans took one of my dad’s hard-carved creations off the porch and smashed it. The idiots did their damage while my father was sitting in the front room watching TV. When he heard the splat, he jumped up and ran out the front door, chasing them all the way up the street. My mom says that he definitely would have caught them except that he was wearing his slippers. She says that they were pretty lucky he didn’t have decent footwear on, because it was one of the rare times he got really, truly angry. Stupid hooligans.

On Halloween night, he’d light our pumpkins at home, and then take us all trick-or-treating. My dad was a trick-or-treat machine. He’d run us from house to house to house, pausing only to offload our little bags into the two or three garbage bags he was carrying. We’d cover all the streets around ours, and then some, travelling up and down all through the entire subdivision, working hard for upwards of three hours. Between my three sisters and myself, we’d have no trouble filling those garbage bags, and then we’d haul home the booty for sorting. We’d make one big pile and then divide out the chips, then the chocolate, then the candy (with a special little pile of those molasses candies that no one wanted but me). Then my dad would solemnly allow us each to choose three pieces for immediate consumption, while my mom put everything else away, to be doled out in our lunches two pieces at a time until Christmas.

Not counting the stuff my dad sneaked out of the cupboard when he thought we weren’t looking.

We keep our pumpkins outside, but don’t worry Dad — I always have one eye out at all times for the hooligans.