Sunday was the fifth annual pumpkin stabbing at Casa de Dildarian; Saturday was lost entirely to prep work. If you would have told me beforehand that I’d be up until 3am scraping jalepenos and handpainting details on gelatinous eyeballs with food coloring and a tiny brush while watching 21 Jump Street, I’d have called you a stinking liar. The next day, I would have been far too tired to apologize.

You see, I believe in feeding people when they come over for an event. Not feeding them WELL, necessarily, and by well, I mean healthily, but feeding them theme food. It is important that I stuff as much theme as possible into my guests. I couldn’t say exactly WHY it is important to me. It just is. And it is not nearly as important to other people to provide concrete RSVPs, so I had to prepare theme food to feed between nine and twenty-one people. NINE AND TWENTY-ONE. That’s sort of a gap. Sort of a significant gap. So I spent all day Saturday prepping a LOT of food:

-Caramel apples (I know now why they cost so much in stores; they must have a ‘danger’ surcharge tacked onto each one because hot caramel hurts a lot when it splatters on your skin. A LOT.) (PS I have a ton of vanilla beans left over from a different food project and so I scraped some vanilla caviar into the caramel sauce and it made it about twelve different kinds of amazing.) -Fresh grated pumpkin cupcakes -Witch finger shortbread cookies -Decayed corpse chips & Sweet and Hot Pepper Salsa (This stuff is like salsa crack. Last year, people practically licked out the bowl.) -Freshly flayed flesh jalepeno poppers -Mummy dearest dogs (also known as cuter pigs in blankets) -Beastly brie en croute with a puff pastry spider on top -Roasted squash & garlic dip -Gelatinous eyeballs -Blood & Guts sammiches (turkey & cranberry on croissants) -Butterbeer -Hot cider You can tell I ran out of steam right about the time I said ‘fuck it’ and used teacups to make two giant eyeballs instead of carefully refilling the truffle trays with a turkey baster, waiting a few hours, and painting more irises.

Anne and Jim ended up begging out of the pumpkin patch portion of the day, owing to the Steeler’s game, and Aisling needed to work up the energy to get out of bed as she was getting over feeling sick. So I met up with Tristan, Eric, and Jessica at the patch to go corn-mazing and pick pumpkins. The two mazes this year were shaped like a werewolf and a tombstone, respectively–on the werewolf maze, we decided that we would test the method of taking all lefts to see if that worked to get through the maze. We missed all but one of the punch stations, but sure enough, left-ed our way out of there. On the tombstone maze, we decided to utilize the map to reach all of the punchstations; after we reached the last station, Tristan decided we ought to put our maps away and try to find our way out without them, which resulted in us ending up walking past two punchstations we’d done already and eventually having to pull out the maps in shame. It really wouldn’t be a party without shame involved in some fashion.

Afterward, we picked out our pumpkins and drove back to my place so I could begin the process of stuffing everyone full of fun to the gills. If they did not have gills already, it was extra handy to have all of the carving tools nearby.

Aisling made what Jim dubbed a ‘Jap-o-Lantern’. Yes. We ARE going to hell. If you laughed, you’re coming with us.

I dressed Napoleon up in his jack-o-lantern doggy t-shirt, which is irresistably cute. Anne attempted to call him over to her, but he refused to walk on the plastic dropcloth, so all we ended up with was photographic evidence of a little more shame.

This year, I ended up using a pattern because my creative juices were on empty. I also fail at taking photographs of the day, and I blame exhaustion because I myself remain blameless.

Napodog was zonked out, too; he’d had a big day of sniffing and licking and freaking out near the front door and shameless begging and stealing Aisling’s turkey sandwich and gobbling the whole thing in one bite.