It’s Halloween time, a most fun holiday for kids. We were all kids once, even ole 96 year-old me. I remember when I was just knee-high to a grasshopper, perched atop Grandpa’s lap one balmy late-October afternoon just north of the equator during one of our family reunions. (The climate always seemed to dictate the locale of those wack gatherings.) As custom, sitting on a rattan rocker (one of many found on the rental house’s wrap-around porch) was Grandpa and me. With a sideways glance, beneath the elephantine flaps of skin rife with highways of ancient wrinkles (man, that’s gross), he spit out his ivory-carved Medusa head-shaped pipe and said to me in a most uncommon tone:

“Little feller, Halloween is the one time when ya get ta wear a mask and it’s cool. Otherwise, don’t wear masks in life, real or metaphoric. I suppose if ya make way to one of them health and beauty resort places, you can allow an exfoliating skin mask to be applied on ya for a period of time, but that’s it. Capiche?”

You bet I understood. Shit’s been my code ever since. Can hear him still, clear as a cloudless day.

So with that emotional reminiscence said, let’s pay tribute to this holiday of holidays, a time when the elders of yesteryear give allowance to transform into a monstrous form of our choosing; whether it be beast, vampire, werewolf, Frankenstein monster, unicorn, you name it. I have tried to be the Invisible Man on many an occasion, but to no avail.

And please allow us to give a special shout out to the often unsung squashes that sacrifice themselves in order to give light to this ritual of night — pumpkins. And in particular, this quartet of seminal major motion pictures regarding pumpkins.

1) Jack-O

2) Pumpkinhead

3) Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings

4) The Pumpkin Karver

(The first film has nothing to do with Michael Jackson, mind you.)

Simply put, all four rule. So when you’re carving out your own big round orange guy on the back deck, think of how this super activity unites families and friends alike. In a day and age when so many of us forget to connect, it’s pumpkins that are the glue – the mortar of the pyramids of our lives.

(Interesting tidbit: The New Yorker tried very hard for permission to print this for their back column, and we steadfastly replied, “Thank you, but no thank you!”)

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 4:34 pm and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.