Cool: Michael’s is selling plastic teal pumpkins for people who plan on offering non-food treats for allergic trick or treaters as part of the Teal Pumpkin Project. You can still paint a pumpkin teal, of course, but this simplifies the setup. (Are we really that close to Halloween already?)
The idea behind the Teal Pumpkin Project is to offer alternate Halloween treats that aren’t candy, so that kids with severe food allergies can still go Trick-or-Treating. It started last year in Tennessee, and FARE picked it up and promoted it nationwide this year.
When I was a child, I always had to either decline or discard some of my Halloween candy because of my peanut allergy. Fortunately it wasn’t life-threatening for me at the time (that came later), so I could separate them out at the end of the night. A lot of kids develop severe allergies younger than I did, and a lot of them are sensitive enough that the risk of cross-contact — whether in the candy bowl or at the factory — is a major issue.
So in addition to candy, we picked up an assortment of pencils, plastic dinosaurs, hair ribbons and more, and kept them in a separate tray. We painted a fake pumpkin so we could keep it around (though we’ll have to go over it again with better paint or maybe a coat of primer next year), and set it out front where it could be seen from the street. (Update 2021: You can buy plastic pumpkins in teal from a lot of stores these days!)
I’m not sure how many of the kids who chose the toys over the candy did so because of allergies, but we had enough of both to go around.
A photo from last year’s Halloween.
Katie carved this incredible anatomically-correct skull Jack-O-Lantern for Halloween today. Update: Check the comments for her writeup on how she carved it.
It seems to have worked as a “yes, we’re handing out candy” signal. Last year we didn’t get any trick-or-treaters. (We also didn’t put up any decorations that year, either.) This year, they started arriving while I was taking photos of the pumpkin…and while Katie was opening the bags of candy!
She dressed up in her vampire costume, which got some great responses. One trick-or-treater asked about the fangs. She overheard another walking away from the door and wondering, “Do you think she was a real vampire?”
By 8:50 we were down to only three Starbursts left to hand out, so we brought the pumpkin inside and called it a night.
Earlier this afternoon, I ran some errands and deliberately went to the Spectrum so that I’d have a chance of spotting the Great Park Balloon in the air while it still had the Jack-O-Lantern face on. I thought this view made for a nice image of the Great Pumpkin, rising up over the trees.
I’m not much of a pumpkin carver myself, but Katie likes to get creative. Here are some Jack-O-Lanterns she’s done, inspired by science fiction, fantasy, comics and games.
From 2003… Gourdzilla!
Inspired by a Grand Ave. strip earlier that week.
Also, Aeryn Sun from Farscape!
More about these: 2003 Halloween Madness
From 2005… Puzzle Pirates’ Navigation puzzle!
Yes, the “Arrr!” on the wall is a projection.
More: Pumpkin Arrrrrt.
And finally, one that hasn’t been on this blog before: The Eye of Sauron, from 2002. Unfortunately we could only find one picture of it, and it was lit up from the outside, so you can’t see how awesome it looked in the dark.
(Evidently, whoever sat at this desk liked dogs.)
This year’s Jack-O-Lantern will be up soon!
