Nativity

There has been a pumpkin sitting on the counter since the beginning of October. We didn't carve it on Halloween, so we kept it around for November. Well, folks, it's December, and the pumpkin is still on our counter! So, tonight, I was sitting in the living room, relaxing after having taken my Corporations final this afternoon, just staring at the pumpkin, wondering what to do with it. Jess and I had already talked about roasting the pumpkin seeds, but I also kind of wanted to carve it. I mean, you might as well if you're going to go to the trouble of scraping out the innards, right?

But, it would not be appropriate to carve a traditional jack-o'-lantern. We have Christmas lights and a tree up, after all! What, then, to do? My first thought was to carve Santa Claus' face, and then put a Santa hat on the pumpkin, but I decided that my carving skills were not quite at that level. I decided that a snowflake would be doable, and grabbed some paper and a pencil to sketch out what I wanted it to look like. I poked some strategic holes in the pumpkin as a guide, and, within two cuts, had already messed up the symmetry of the snowflake. Now, I could not live with an unsymmetrical snowflake, so I quickly abandoned that plan.

As I looked at my cuts, I realized that it kind of looked like a crucifix, so I added another cut to complete it. Then, I carved out part of the bottom as the ground. I liked it a lot, especially its avant-garde angle. But, then it hit me that this made it more of an Easter pumpkin than a Christmas pumpkin. What to do?! I thought about it for a little bit, and decided on this:

You see? The first crucifix was on the left, and then I added another one on the right to create a manger. The three triangles in the center are Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. It's an abstract nativity pumpkin! I think what I really like about it is that the family looks kind of like eyes and a nose, with the ground as a mouth, retaining an echo of a Jack-o'-lantern face.