October means Halloween, of course. And that means it’s time for me to dust off the old jack-o-lantern. Yup, you read that one right. Dust off, as in wipe down the faux pumpkin from Costco that lives in our garage for the other eleven months of the year. We’ve had it for so long now that I consider it vintage décor, rather than merely my own cheap and lazy approach to the season. And unlike the pink sparkly Xmas trees, our pumpkin looks so like the real thing the neighborhood deer nibble on it.

If this makes me sound like the wicked witch of Halloween, it wasn’t always thus. In the old days when my kids trick-or-treated as bunnies and pirates, I went the whole nine yards. First we took a family trip to the pumpkin patch and then I helped them carve out their own personal jack-o-lanterns on the kitchen table. Then we toasted up the seeds with lotsa salt and baked muffins from all the leftover inside goop.