Praise the Gourd
“Halloween used to be so simple. You got a punkin, cut off it’s stringy orange insides, and carved a face on it that looked like your brother. But, that just wasn’t good enough for some folks…
I blame the zombies… You can’t swing a dead cat this time of year without knocking a few down like bowling pins, which is not hard to do, considering they move a the pace of a box turtle…
Mostly, I love Halloween because it is the orange-and-black beginning of a season that tumbles into Thanksgiving, which tumbles into Christmas. And zombies just seem out of place in that…
The iconic image of Halloween should be, as God intended, the punkin. The punkin, carved into faces that are scary only because we want them to be, winking from every front porch. The punkin, cast in plastic, swinging from the hands of knee- high princesses, leering back from department store shelves, until it gives way to tins of butter cookies.
But I fear for the punkin. How long before he is kicked down the street by zombie hordes, booted into obsurity?
Young people tell me that no one- no one- want to dress up like a punkin anymore. All a punkin does, they say, is sit there, and glow.
This may be true, all of it. But, try to make a pie out of a zombie and see where that gets you.”
As seen in Rick Bragg’s Southern Journal article, Southern Living, October 2013.
