Why there will be no more pumpkins in this house.

To begin with, I'm not a big fan of pumpkins. (What they call pumpkin spice, yes, but I feel like apple cider spice got unfairly scooped in advertising when it came to naming flavors...) So every year, my daughter makes puppy eyes at me asking about getting a pumpkin to carve, and every year, I reluctantly let her do it, and every year, I'm finding pumpkin seeds stuck down with pumpkin goo to my floor and furniture for a week after the great pumpkin carving massacre.

I can see the appeal of Jack-O-Lanterns, though; it's exciting to have angry vegetables with fire in them.

But this is the last year we are doing living pumpkins, and here's why:

We bought this year's pumpkin through a fundraiser at my daughter's school. It had a little rotten spot that we carved out as part of the design. In retrospect, I should have been more wary of this pumpkin.

Because we did not get a pumpkin.

We got an X-files case.( Like X-files, it gets gross... )