Once My Looks Go, I've Got Nothing

As far as I can tell (my childhood memories are spotty at best), I've always loved Halloween. The October celebration of ghosts and goblins and high-fructose corn syrup touched something deep inside my evil little heart, as you can see in the photo above, where I proudly display both a cornucopia of seasonal items and my finest Gecko Hawaii shirt. In the spirit of the season, I have taken the liberty of scanning and collecting some old photos of these early Halloweens to share with you. It's like peeking into your trick-or-treat bag at the end of the night...let's see what we've got! This photo is the earliest one I could find. I'm wearing a dinosaur onesie that my mom sewed based on a pattern she purchased at Michael's. I'm also apparently camera shy, or perhaps weeping. Equally likely, I suppose. Oh, and one note: most of these scans are from old Polaroids that survived a house fire and a closet flooding, so if they're washed out and/or ashy,

When I was walking down the street today, I saw this: Now this could mean one of two things: either someone is preparing to burn Tobey Maguire in effigy for that dance scene in Spider-Man 3 (which I liked , suck it, haters), or it's Halloween season again! This is perfect, because it gives me an excuse to drone on at length about one of my favorite things: pumpkin carving! Avid readers of my blog may recall my earlier installment about pumpkin carving pioneers Carve-O-Lantern , as well as the sequel post about their product line expansion. Well, there's still plenty of meat on this bone, so I'm diving into a pumpkin PIE-le of patterny goodness to bring you this retrospective! Carve-O-Lantern (and later, Pumpkin Masters) have released so much material over the decades that I could-and possibly might-write about this stuff forever. So let's go waaaaay back to the early days of the brand to take a look at how their pumpkin carving kits have evolved through time. I&

     You know the traditional image of a jack-o-lantern?   The triangle eyes and nose, the grinning mouth with a few scattered teeth here and there? I don’t recall ever carving one in my life. I may have, and my grandmother certainly did, but I cannot think of a single instance in which I did so myself. And yet I have carved many a jack-o-lantern, often several each year. The reasoning behind this seemingly paradoxical situation can be summed up in a compound word: Carve-O-Lantern. However, just because it can be summed up thusly doesn’t mean it should be, so please allow me to explain.      A Wisconsin engineer by the name of Paul Bardeen came to the realization several decades ago (during the 1940s, as far as I can discern) that the time-honored tradition of hacking up a pumpkin with a kitchen knife or box cutter had some drawbacks. Specifically, the combination of knives and children inherent in pumpkin carving carried with it an alarming risk for lacerations and/or stabbi