I’m going to try something different for Halloween this year. Last year, I was in Fresno, and I was in Memphis the year before that. This year I think I’ll spend the holiday at home.

We’re all about Halloween around here. It’s probably my favorite holiday (after you rule out the good ones where people give you stuff), and Zoe is taking after her old man in that regard. Her costume has been lined up for weeks now and today we finally got around to carving the pumpkins like she’s been bugging us to do.

First, let’s talk about her costume. Here’s the picture from the package:

Let me just say Oh. My. God. Zoe looks nothing like that in it. If she did, several things would be happening: A) she would not be wearing it or anything like it, ever, B) she would be locked away in a boy-proof room somewhere in an undisclosed location, and C) I would be standing guard outside that room with a locked-and-loaded 12 gauge Mossberg. Now, all those things are going to happen anyway once she hits puberty, but this costume reminded me that I need to get started making the preparations. She is, as Beth likes to say “8 going on 16.”

Anyway, the costume’s been in hand for awhile now, and today we got started on the pumpkins. Zoe “helped” with scraping the guts out. Here she it working on one of them:

She was disturbingly fixated on the pumpkin guts. She collected them all in a bowl and then spent the next hour kneading them bare-handed until they had been reduced to a disgusting porridge of orange goo. She was quite proud of herself and insisted that I post the following picture.

Before = pre-gutting, After = post-gutting, but pre-kneading. I didn’t get a picture of the fully-kneaded goo because it was just too disgusting, even for me. Picture a frothy bowl of stringy Orange Julius with a soundtrack of squelching and Zoe muttering “Cooooooollllll!!!!” Blech!

The finished product came out looking pretty good, I think. (The jack-o-lanterns, not the goo.) Here they are in the dark:

And here they are out front, carefully positioned to strike fear into trick-or-treaters.

There’s more to do out front — I still need to build a graveyard in the entry way and set up the fog machine and put the giant spiderweb up next to the front door, but we’re officially under way now that the pumpkins are carved.

Stand by for more Halloween goodness…