Get that candle away from me! And you can put that knife down too!
Alright, so you’re telling me that for 11 months of the year, you don’t care about me. I don’t even enter your mind. The only people who do stop to think about me are hippies with dream catchers in the living room and dungarees for every day of the week. They want to make me into soup and feather coriander on the top because apparently that’s nice. Even that involves a knife, come on what is it with the knives?!
And then comes October. Ah, glorious October. We can put fake cobwebs in the window and paint ourselves green with blood and fangs — haha such fun. Not for me mate. No no, October is the end of the line for me. If it’s the colour orange you like then just take the satsumas but leave me alone.
So you go out and find one of me and my family — and my goodness you love the fat pumpkins don’t you. Oh yeah, you’ve got no time for small pumpkins. So some of the less plump-kins get another year of freedom (or get nabbed last minute by 36-year-old Jennifer who forgot about Halloween, and for whom you are the last resort to stop her kid from crying onto his Spiderman outfit at approximately 4pm on Halloween night).
Anyway this is just bullying: you take me, ‘that big one over there’, so that you can plonk me down on a ruined decade-old table cloth you bring out for craft activities and Indian takeaways. Just as I’m starting to appreciate the central heating, I feel a — OOWWW!
Suddenly I’m minus half a head! ‘Stop it, ow! Look, let’s just talk about this. AGHH! Okay you’re not going to stop now are you? Didn’t think so. How crazy would that be, to get halfway round and then suddenly have a conscience for these casual, murderous actions? Yeah, no. Wouldn’t that just be ridiculous eh. Carry on by all means.
As if a knife wasn’t bad enough, now you’re lowering a candlestick into my gut like it’s nothing. You remember when you were a kid and your mum said ‘here comes the aeroplane’ to make you eat your third piece of broccoli, when really you don’t give a stuff for the aeroplane and you just want to watch tv? Well this is as close as my life gets to the aeroplane. It’s: ‘Here comes the flame.’ BOOM. A lighter. In my face.
Leave me for three hours on the doorstep waiting for eager children to come for chocolate. They run up the driveway and accidentally smack me in that face I’ve been carved. Any sign of a ‘sorry’? No. They get their sweets and then run away for more. Not even a: ‘Hey, nice pumpkin.’
I’d love to tell you what happens next but I really don’t know. At some point throughout the night the candle falls and I slowly crisp into oblivion. Then next year, it all happens again.
Image credit: Matt Eberle via Unsplash