Now I really don't like Halloween
by Juliana

Learn a lesson from me: Don’t keep Halloween around until Thanksgiving. I don’t particularly like Halloween, so I don’t generally put up any decorations for the holiday. Something about a holiday which celebrates ugliness and fear just doesn’t appeal to me. But every time we would drive to the grocery store, my 20-month-old son’s eyes would grow huge and he would point excitedly at the pumpkins. After a month of this, I finally decided to walk him over to the “pumpkin patch” to choose one of his own.
He immediately fell in love with one and pointed to it excitedly. We purchased it, brought it home, and tried to find a good spot for it. It was somewhat crooked and wouldn’t sit up straight, so we rested it against a wall in our foyer for a couple weeks. After telling my husband the story of how Joseph had chosen it, he remarked, “I always wondered how they sold off all those ugly pumpkins.” But I never thought our pumpkin was ugly. Until yesterday.
The pumpkin had been retired to a spot in our family room, resting against our fireplace. I noticed that it had begun to change shape slightly. It no longer stood quite as erect and proud as it once had. It now seemed stooped with old age, decaying before our eyes. I brought this to my husband’s attention and asked, “What should we do with it now?”
“Throw it in the garbage can,” he said.
I frowned. That wasn’t right. “No,” I said. “You’re supposed to throw in the back yard and watch them rot against the fence.”
My husband shrugged his shoulders. “Okay.”
The pumpkin was quite heavy as I lifted it, but I carried it over to the back door without any trouble. Then I gingerly held it by it’s stem, trying not to touch the soft and rotting part on the bottom. I counted aloud, swinging it up, ready to be tossed it the yard, “One… two…three!” But before I quite got to three, the pumpkin swung back into the house, tearing free of it’s stem. All the force which I hoped would send it a good distance into our frozen yard was turned backwards onto my brand new, white-colored carpet. With a gentle “squash” (fitting, eh?) the pumpkin collapsed onto our family room floor.
A small portion of the inner pumpkin looked familiar and pumpkin-like, but the majority looked like a soft, rotten mess. The seeds were black with apparent mold. I stared in horror at the mess before me, right inside our doorway. The bitter cold wind coming in from the open door brought me back to reality.
I’ll spare you the details of staying up late, trying to make our orange carpet white again. Just believe me when I say: Don’t keep Halloween around until Thanksgiving.
And next time you’re at my house, don’t be surprised to see the remains of a rotting pumpkin just outside my back door, and the fingerprint it left just inside.