I love fall best of all

I love fall best of all.  I love the colors, the smells and the weather.  I love the breezes and the sense of reaping or harvesting.  I love the start of new things like school and music lessons and drama and church clubs.  But fall seems the shortest season of all where we live. 

 I will always remember the gorgeous colors of the trees along the Saskatchewan river as I rattled over the Hawrelak Bridge on my way to university on the public transit for 4 years (fighting motion sickness and reciting Bible verses to calm myself at the speed our driver went around those corners). 

Somehow amidst the germs and the diesel smell of the bus, I would escape reality to focus on beauty for a little while.  The rich colors only lasted about 2 weeks, and that's part of what made it so special.

My kids' favorite part is carving pumpkins.  I hate that part of fall.  

 I sometimes catch myself thinking, "maybe the kids will forget to ask to carve pumpkins this year."
They never forget.

They beg every year to wield the razor-sharp Henckel knives and I hate the possible blood and trauma.  I insist on doing all the cutting myself.  Each one gets to draw / design their own little pumpkin character, and clean out his innards, but the knives stay in adult hands. 

I hate the goo and the slime and the way the raw pumpkins smell. 

But I love watching their faces as they create and design and scrape and shape this yearly work of art.

Once we get the seeds out we rinse and season them and bake a bunch for snacking and cracking.  That part I like.

My favorite piece of this whole yearly tradition is how much my kids love it.  What is it about turning a large orange vegetable into a face of sorts that makes the kids so excited?  I'm not sure, but the creators of VeggieTales sure knew what they were doing.  

  

And after each little pumpkin head is finished, and we are crunching away on pumpkin seeds and every little face is grinning at their pumpkin friend, I'm always glad I pretended to be excited right along with my little people.  I'm glad I stifled my gag reflex and stuck my hand down inside the stringy, semi-sticky guts of yet another pumpkin, and pulled out the slippery seeds and risked my digits to cut a pair of buck teeth into another pumpkin face. 

And now, even though we've had a beautiful and long-lasting fall, pumpkin season is over, and Christmas is around the corner...

Next... the store-bought gingerbread house with icing that tastes like glue...