Imperfect Pumpkins

Children and Halloween just seem to go together.  Marching around the neighborhood at dusk in store-bought costumes – the uniform of the holiday, collecting tolls in the form of sugary treats, playing fast and loose with the images of death – skeletons, ghosts, witches, and vampires – with a few superheroes thrown in.  Even the adult costume parties have an air of carefree childishness.  gives us a silly break from work and from school.  It’s a time to go out and play.

For a month or more before October 31^st, the stores display the implements of the scary season, on sale at reasonable prices for the kid in all of us.  I can’t remember an October I passed by the Halloween aisle in my accustomed grocery store without checking out a costume or two, and trying on a scary mask.

Pumpkins pop up everywhere, not just at the grocery stores.  They fill the lawns of many churches, and families make their pilgrimages to select the perfect specimen for their front steps.

The perfect pumpkin is a uniform orange in color, nearly spherical in shape, and with a stem that is just long enough to serve as a handle when a section of the top is cut to make an opening.  The perfect pumpkin is one of the icons of the holiday.  Witches, ghosts and skeletons have a place of honor on October 31^st, but they are welcome to haunt other days of the year as well.  Nothing says Halloween like the perfect pumpkin, carved with the eerie visage of a jack o’ lantern.

But not all pumpkins are the same, and there are always some less-than-perfect left-behinds as October turns into November and the market for big orange cultivar squashes disappears.  So it was with some surprise that I happened upon a particular church lawn that did not belong exclusively to the contenders for the title of perfect pumpkin.  In fact, some of these squashes were quite unusual, and set my imagination to work.

Do jack o’ lanterns have to be spherical?  Does a Halloween pumpkin need to be orange?   On a night when we put on costumes to step away from our day-to-day identities, do we really want to decorate our front step with the same vegetable as all of our neighbors?

Individuality is a funny thing.  We prize our own and do not want to be a face in the crowd, but we are wary of differences in others.  When we encounter something unexpected, we catch ourselves wondering if the out-of-the-ordinary is something we need to worry about, protect ourselves against, or seek to eliminate.

Children may wear different costumes on Halloween, but the differences on the inside are the more profound.  Imperfect pumpkins, all of them.  And yet we tend to choose and reward the ones that conform more closely to our idea of the ideal. The children who don’t fit our preconceived notion trouble us.  We leave them behind.  We try to force them to change.  We tell them they are wrong for being who they are.

But look how interesting they are.  Look how beautiful they are!