Every year, on the night before our town’s ‘designated’ Trick or Treat night, my best friend and I get together to carve pumpkins.  We don’t do simple carvings nor do we do a mere one or two.  We do elaborate detailed carvings on six to eight of them.  

     After twenty-five years, we’ve perfected our method.  We do our most difficult carvings on the first ones.  Hey, we’re feeling fresh so they go fast.  With the first two finished, we take a break, open a bottle of wine, pour a glass, put candles in our finished pumpkins, light them, and turn out the kitchen lights so we can see what the pumpkins look like.  We ooh and ah, blow the candles out, turn the lights back on, place the finished pumpkins on my back porch and sip our wine. 

     Our second two pumpkin patterns are not as difficult as the first ones, they are intermediate they aren’t that tough to do.  Happy we finish them in a little more time than the first ones took to do.  We sip our wine, candles, light them, lights off, ooh, ah, lights on, candles out, pumpkins on porch, we quaff our wine. 

     By the third one each, our hands are getting numb and sore.  The patterns are easy ones and they take us longer to carve.  We put in candles and light them, lights off, ooh, ah, lights on, candles out, pumpkins on porch, we swig our wine, and hope the cramps in our hands subside. 

     At this point, my friend asks, “Do we really need eight pumpkins this year?  Whose idea was it to buy four pumpkins each?”

     “You’re said to buy four each.”

     “How numb are your hands?” 

     “Not nearly numb enough.”

     “Remind me, why do we do this every year?”

     “Because we love seeing the reactions.  Because after 25 years of doing this, the kids and their parents expect them.”

     We stare at the last two pumpkins.  We chug our wine.  We carve….