I’ve loved carving pumpkins since I was a little girl. There’s something so much fun about giving an inanimate vegetable some personality. Even though carving is not an art form I’m skilled at, in fact I can be pretty dangerous with a knife in my hand, I do enjoy trying my luck at creating a little festive work of art, and if I do need to pause midway through to apply a Band-Aid and my finished jack-o-lantern has a bit of blood smeared on it, well that just adds to the fun, right?

I’ll admit I’m not too fond of scooping all the insides out of the pumpkin. Those slimy, gloopy insides are pretty icky feeling, but they do contain something magical. I’m talking, of course, about that delicacy known as pumpkin seeds. Because freshly roasted pumpkin seeds are the absolute best part about carving pumpkins. Yes, I know you can buy bags of salted pumpkin seeds at stores, but they taste so much better when they’re fresh and still warm and crispy from the oven. We usually line a baking sheet with foil, sprinkle them generously with salt, and cook them until they just start to turn golden brown. Yum. I’m making myself hungry just talking about them.

Well, I didn’t get to enjoy any freshly baked pumpkin seeds when I made my jagged little jack-o-lanterns illustrations, but I did have a lot of fun creating the different grinning faces of these kawaii-inspired cuties, and I managed to not cut myself! When I do carve pumpkins, it’s just one pumpkin at a time. Hey, it’s a lot of work, more than that would just be too much. Still with only a single pumpkin as my canvas, I have to be really choosy about the face I carve into it, but for my jagged little jack-o-lanterns I had the opportunity to try out all different faces and expressions, and I didn’t have to scoop out any slimy pumpkin guts, that almost makes up for the lack of freshly roasted pumpkin seeds. Almost.