As a child I always remember that special time of year spent with my family going to the Fall Festival and picking out the Just Right pumpkin.I must of been a pickey kid because it always took me the longest. I wanted my pumpkin to be perfectly rounded on both sides and the brightest orange out of all the other pumpkins. The best part of the whole experience was getting it home and carving it. I vividely recall the cold, wet, slimey feeling when reaching into my pumpkin to pull out all the guts and seeds. My dad and brother would help set up a make shif table in our driveway so we had a place to sit our pumpkins as we carved.
The next step was to decide what we wanted our pumpkin to be. This was a challenge. We did not own the best carving tools. Mom would pick up the pumpkin carving kit from the local grocery store. The knife and paper pattern was not easy to work with. We would work for what seemed to be hours carving out our master piece.
Once we were finished we gathered up all our guts and seeds and placed them into a big plastic bowl. I always remember it being dark before we were finished which was perfect because we could light our candels and place them into our pumpkins to display our master pieces for everyone to see when they walked up our long and narrow sidewalk. After a few minutes of gauking at our master pieces and deciding whose was the best we would go into the house and begin the process of seperating the pumpkin seeds from the pumpkin guts. This was a lonf and stickey process. We would lay out newspapers on the kitchen table and place the big plastic bowl in the center. Once we wre finally done we would take half the seeds and spred them out on a cookie sheet to go into the oven.
We liked salt so we were sure to sprinkel a lot of salt all over the seeds before we put them into the oven. The other half of the seeds we let sit over night and in the morning we would take a small metal kitchen spoon into the back yard and dig little holes placing two-four seeds in each hole. We did not know much about gardening but it worked. The following summer we had mounds of pumpkins growing in our back yard! It was very exciting to watch them grow every day out our back picture window.
