Halloween is children’s favorite holiday.     

  
 
Our neighbors compete to see who has the most incredible Halloween decorations every year. They seem to get more creative and crazy each year. 
Each October, skeletons, tombstones, and spider webs adorn many families’ front yards, and the whole neighborhood gets into the spooky spirit. 
When we walk our dogs, Bailey and Oscar, at night, a 12′ high black ghost with red eyes suddenly screams and acts as if it will pounce on us. Or we will see a white, ghost-like shadow floating on a branch in the distance. Even though we know it is Halloween, there is a brief moment of being scared! 
Of course, pumpkins are an essential part of Halloween—and also my favorite part. 
Before I came to America, I never knew there were so many varieties and shapes of pumpkins. Walking around our neighborhood, I like to observe them and categorize their shapes. 
Their bodies are round, gourd-shaped, oval, and sometimes a bit like a serpent; I even saw one shaped like Saturn with a ring around it. Others have shapes that no words can describe. 
Pumpkins’ colors and skins, like their shapes, vary widely. Some are white, green, orange, and yellow. Their skins are sometimes smooth, other times rough, and occasionally covered with pimple-like lumps. Maybe ugly is bad for other creatures, but for the pumpkin of Halloween, we think the ugliest will be the stars.
In our neighborhood, every house will have at least one pumpkin in the front yard. We are no exception. 
This year, I learned a valuable lesson about Halloween pumpkins. We were so happy because even though we didn’t find the ugliest pumpkin, we got three giant ones—the biggest we’ve ever had. We were so excited. We even thought they might be our neighborhood’s largest pumpkins!
Many people who passed our house and saw our three enormous Halloween fruits asked us where we got them? We proudly gave them all the details. 
After Halloween and all the “trick or treat” fun, we started to think about what to do with our giant pumpkins. In past years, we usually kept them until they began to rot. Then, we would throw them in the trash. But, this year, I was not willing to throw them away.
Just after Halloween, Bailey, our beloved Lab’s vet, told us, “Bailey is overweight. She must lose weight! If not, she will be sick. You must feed her less food!”
“But she is always hungry,” I said. I could not face her hungry eyes.”
“You can feed her pumpkins! Adding pumpkin to a dog’s food helps them lose weight”, the vet said.
“Sounds great! We have a few big pumpkins from Halloween. May we use them?” I asked
“Yes, of course!” the vet answered me.
Great! But I wondered how I should cook our vast pumpkins. One needs such a big pot to cook them, and I wasn’t even sure we had a big enough knife to cut them.
Cleverly, I found a hacksaw in our tool shed and approached one of the pumpkins like a carpenter—poo-chee, poo-chee sawing wood. I sawed it into a few big pieces, and then I peeled its skin.

It was a hard job. My hands had blisters. But I finally got it done.
Once I had the giant pumpkin sawed into pieces, It took a few trips to put the chunks in a large pot in our home and steam them until they were tender.
After all this hard work, I learned a big lesson.
I put all the pumpkin skin into our garbage disposal like we always do with the remains of our meals. (Yes, we should be composting and are working on getting there.) When I turned on the disposal,  the pumpkin skin jammed it and blocked the drain in our sink. 
So frustrating! Unfortunately, we had to hire a plumber to clear the drain. 
Looking back, choosing to cook our Halloween pumpkins was quite a journey of learning. Our lovely dogs had never had such expensive food before, not to mention my whole day’s hard work.
It is better to use the Halloween pumpkins to make compost! They were even Halloween’s pumpkin stars.
Nevertheless, we love Halloween and have fun decorating our pumpkins and walking around our neighborhood to see how other families have done theirs.