Earthly Delights

Local Produce as Decoration - Apply Yourself!

By April Gonzales

Every year, a group of us has a pumpkin-carving contest. People have gone to extraordinary lengths to win. One contestant stayed up all night, ensconced in the bathroom, drilling holes in the pumpkin with a dremel tool so that she could push Christmas lights through. Needless to say, she won that and many other years for her creativity. Another year she cut the top off of the pumpkin and carved HOLLYWOOD all along the rim with flames licking at the letters, this was the year that tinsel town caught on fire. I've reproduced Van Gogh's "Starry Night," had bats emerging from a mouthful of fangs, and did a seashell motif pumpkin. This is a labor of love. It takes hours to get just one pumpkin in shape.

More traditional jack-o'-lanterns tend to glow the best in the dark, but what else can you do to decorate? One year we raised glowing pumpkins up on bamboo stakes, creating an eerie Greek chorus that greeted trick or treaters on Elm Street.

My favorite Halloween party décor was created by my friends Laura and Dan Reilly years ago. Out in a big field, they made a Halloween circle around a bonfire. The circle was punctuated by six or so teepees made from tree saplings and bamboo. To complete the circle, garlands of bittersweet swooped almost to the ground in between the bamboo teepees, so you had to symbolically step into the area to reach the fire and chat with the other guests. No one stayed outside the circle.

They had carved jack-o'-lanterns earlier in the week and suspended them from the top of each teepee. The ambiance revealed itself when the fire was lit and the pumpkins glowed. The Reillys had created a round room - an inner night circle so to speak - for their friends to come into and celebrate Halloween. The glow of the fire illuminated the swags of bittersweet, which gave a psychological sense of enclosure - sanctuary against the night. The entire tableaux, seen from a distance, was inviting and warm, yet mysterious and exciting.

So how do we top that? With a jack-o'-lantern totem pole? Let them swing from the trees? Make dragons or monsters that twirl around the house or slither in and out of the ground? Build corn stalk houses that they live in or are trying to escape from? Clearly, imagination is the greater part of Halloween as it is celebrated today. (Just ask my niece - this year she's going as a cheeseburger on the grill.)

The jack-o'-lantern was always a beacon, whether for a good purpose or to chase away evil. But the sheer carve-ability of pumpkins, gourds, zucchini or squash, and their tendency to glow brilliantly against the black night, is more of an invitation to get creative and go beyond the bounds not just of the everyday, but of the supernatural. At the Bridgehampton pumpkin-carving contest, I've seen numerous combinations (as the photo shows) of gourds, squash and vegetables all cut up and lit from within to resemble prisons, dragons, pirates, mushrooms, octopi.

A few tips: you don't need to start with a perfectly round pumpkin. Tooth picks and string may be required. Glue won't work. If you over-carve, the whole thing will collapse. But with the abundance of materials available at the local farm stands, the sky is the limit!

What to do now:

Get your pumpkins before they all get snatched up! Don't wait until the week before or the farm stands will be cleaned out!

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