COLUMN: Carving arms and poisoning cookies; I love Halloween!
Today, I feel a little depressed, and this time it’s not because coronal mass ejections have been triggering severe geomagnetic storms in our atmosphere – although that may be why I’ve been shocking more people than usual.
No, I’m depressed because today, like every year, millions of people around the globe are celebrating my friend, John’s birthday by dressing weird, pulling pranks, drinking mind-blowing amounts of alcohol, and binging on sickening quantities of candy. Why can’t that happen on my birthday?
Maybe I’m just not as cool as John is, or more likely it’s because my birthday is in January, a month when nothing exciting happens, ever. Well, nothing unless you enjoy seeing interesting new shades of blue from watching the occasional frostbitten, short-short-wearing jogger running around in the snow. The only other January highlight is the day your mom finally stops nagging about the walkway because the shovel “accidentally” broke under the strain of snow removal. I have no idea what that is like.
I usually like to partake in the fun of Halloween, oops – I mean John’s birthday, but sometimes I really wonder about the insanity surrounding the Oct. 31 celebration. The last time I dressed up in an effort to obtain a confectionery delight, not counting last year’s Easter fiasco, occurred when I was 12. Seeing my large stature, too many neighbors mistook me for a real policeman and were a little disturbed when I showed up on their doorsteps. Some folks even tried to report the little old lady down the street handing out potentially poisonous cookies to kids instead of individually wrapped, toxin-free, partially hydrogenated, unleaded morsels of candy.
I didn’t care. I just wanted a sugar high, and at the impervious age of 12, I was just hoping to get something cool like a tasty apple complete with rusty razorblade. No such luck. The next year I went off to boarding school, and there my gluttonous dreams died. Besides, I couldn’t fit into any cool costumes like Spiderman and Shredder anymore.
One Halloween practice that I’ve always deemed a complete waste of time is carving pumpkins. As if giving young scouts pocketknives isn’t dangerous enough, do we really need another method for small children to receive lacerations? Since I grew up in Southeast Asia, I never felt the thrill of cutting a hole in a giant orange blob and subsequently cutting a hole in my arm, but I do not feel deprived. To this day I have never carved a pumpkin and probably never will, most likely because I’m lazy.
Apparently, this gourd-routing tradition stems from the numerous Irish immigrants who flooded the United States back in the 1800s. They used to make lanterns out of potatoes, turnips and other farm-fresh produce to scare away evil spirits and occasionally the French. Upon arriving to the New World they discovered millions of pumpkins with apparently no feasible use at all. Instead of launching them or smashing them with baseball bats, an author-preferred late October pastime, they decided to carve scary faces and light them up.
The first guy to test out a pumpkin must have had a little too much Guinness, because who, without being wasted, would ever decide to scoop out all that smelly, nasty junk with their bare hands and declare this fruit useable for making lanterns? Personally, I would have gotten Blaine to do it, because he’s used to messy things – you should see his roommate.
Even if folks have a hankering for cutting something, we just don’t need candle lanterns anymore; Thomas Edison solved that problem for us. Now that we have Wal-Mart open 24 hours a day, we can just buy an electric jack-o-lantern and save everyone some time and fingers.
So what can you do with all your new free time from not having to carve a pumpkin? My emphatic exhortation, especially to Janelle, would be to join the Garden Gnome Liberation Front. This exclusive organization has the sole purpose to free gnomekind from the gardens of the earth and let the little ornamental people roam around as they please. I’m not making this up, there are, in reality, activists dedicated to “freeing” gnomes; trust me, just look on the Internet.
I’ve never been a lawn creature aficionado, so I will refrain from taking time out of my busy schedule to filch gnomes, but rest assured that I will not be carving any pumpkins either. When you go out and party tonight, I definitely will not be that tall guy in the bushes armed with a baseball bat and M-80s. Even if I were the one lurking, tattletales would suffer the complete phthisis of their souls before I ever get put in the blotter. Bwoohooohahahah! Janelle, you owe me five bucks.
Garrett Wheeler is majoring in electrical engineering. Thomas Edison has appeared to him in dreams to help him with homework. If you need help with your homework, too, contact him at wheel@cc.usu.edu.