Halloween: it happened.

Happy Halloween, everybody! Say, did you get a big pre-Halloween snowstorm? We did! We got the kind of late-October snowstorm that dumps six inches of incredibly wet, heavy snow on you, breaks your trees in half, makes a giant mess, and then melts away within hours of falling. We had 10- and 12-foot sections of maple break off in our front yard, but, thinking the worst was over, I managed to move them aside enough for my daughter to make a tiny, adorable snowman. Later that day another 12-foot section broke off and crushed it, leaving me to wonder in horror what would have happened had we been building that tiny, adorable snowman at a different time. Anyhoo.

A few days earlier a coworker passed along free tickets to the Roger Williams Park Zoo Jack-o-Lantern Spectacular, which is kind of a big deal among some around here, so we counted ourselves $24 richer and headed out on Friday evening to see what was what. We got there just as the sun was setting, and I was a little disappointed that the animals weren't staying up to join in the fun with us; they turned in as usual while we were guided along a very specific path to the pumpkins. In any case, it was... nice? It's one of those exhibitions of thousands and thousands of pumpkins - some intricately carved, some simply - lit up along a walkway along which many, many people move very slowly. Personally I find large groups of slow-moving people to be incredibly irritating, but I find large numbers of softly glowing anything to be very pretty, as long as those anythings are not lava pits or plutonium rods. There were some smoke machines and piped-in music thrown in, too.

Tell me: when did an approximation of a human face become an inadequate design for a jack-o-lantern? Somewhere along the line people moved away from faces and toward just about anything else. There were recently-deceased business visionaries:


Photo by Rick Payette on Flickr

Bumper Stickers:

Photo by Rick Payette on Flickr

Golden Girls:

Photo by Svenstorm on Flickr

And Dexter next to Lightning McQueen, because why not?

Oh, right: all those reasons why not. There were also Snooki and Pauly D pumpkins, but I'm having a hard time finding pictures of them. Maybe those abominations won't photograph. Like vampires.

It turned out that this was all a very roundabout way of finding out that my daughter is terrified of jack-o-lanterns. But really: why wouldn't she be? With the exception of the ones that are used as artists' canvases, these are big vegetables with faces on them that are burning up from the inside while looking at you malevolently. In this instance, by the thousands. And hundreds and hundreds of people are puttering through, drinking hot cider, eating fried dough, and taking picture after picture after picture. It's cool, but it's also really surreal. I can't even imagine how confusing it must be for a three-year-old. Maybe we'll wait a few more years before we go again.

In the meantime, let's take a minute to thank our sponsors: