Have you picked your pumpkin?
It is that time of year again, and my timeline is full of ultra cute pumpkin patch pictures. Babies propped on pumpkins, toddlers on hay bales, cute cats in Halloween sweaters, families pictured in the standard “dad’s arm around mom’s shoulders, kids in front” pose, usually in matching sweaters or flannel shirts.
On my morning walk it seems that every other porch has pumpkins on the front steps, sheaves of corn flanking front doors, orange and yellow and burgundy mums glinting in the autumn sunlight, hay bales under trees with scarecrows propped up on them in sitting positions. Sometimes the scarecrows have pumpkins for heads.
Then of course there are the Halloween decorations; ghosties hanging from trees, ceramic hands clawing up out of the lawn, decorative cemetery headstones and skeletons, little skeletons riding bicycles or playing with skeleton dogs, animated witches that start to cackle when they detect movement, or the 12-foot-tall behemoth skeletons towering over their yards.
No matter if they are celebrating autumn or Halloween, it seems that almost everyone gets into the autumn decorating act, just like they get into posting the super cute pictures of their children and animals in matching sweater sets.
But the pumpkins; the pumpkins are everywhere. There are roadside stands heaped with gourds. There are pumpkin patches where you can go to select and/or pick your own pumpkin (price per pound). And then it seems that every grocery store has huge boxes of pumpkins outside of their doors. “2 for $12” or “4 for $20.”
Last week my husband looked up from his phone, where he was placing an order with Wal-Mart, to ask me if I wanted him to order a couple of pumpkins for delivery.”
“I’m sorry, did you say pumpkins for delivery?”
“Yeah, I’m putting in an order, it should be delivered by three. Do you want me to ask for a couple of pumpkins for the front porch?”
“Oh hell to the no!” was my immediate response. He looked at me, startled.
“You don’t want any pumpkins?”
“Of course I want pumpkins, but I don’t want someone else picking out my pumpkins.”
“Uh, ok.” The poor guy looked rather hurt, as if I had yelled at him, and I realized that I had been rather abrupt in my answer.
“Pumpkin picking is personal” I said, desperate to explain. Hubby just raised his eyebrows.
“No, really” I insisted, “when I was a kid my grandmother always got to choose the pumpkins for our house. She got to choose what kind of faces – if any – would be carved into them. Pumpkin picking is one of the joys of the season, I can’t let someone else pick them for me.”
And so it was that we ended up at a local supermarket where we each picked out a pumpkin for the front porch from the rows upon rows of pumpkins stacked against the outside wall of the store, and it dawned on me that the concept of pumpkin picking being personal is, in its own way, representative of what we in America have lost as a society.
How often do we inadvertently let someone or something else choose what events we are made aware of, what we are going to buy, where we are going to eat, or even what we are going to believe? We assume that we make those choices ourselves, but do we really? How many of our choices are influenced by multi-million-dollar marketing campaigns or dictated by algorithms that collect what they see as all of our personal preferences pertinent information and then only show us products or news articles or friends’ posts that IT thinks we should be paying attention to?
The way I see it, I may not have much of a choice as to what the algorithms decide to show me or how specific corporations influence everything from political campaigns to TikTok trends to the items you find at eye-level in the grocery stores, but when it comes to picking out my pumpkins, I’ll be damned if I let someone or something else choose them for me. Pumpkins are where I put my foot down.
Maybe putting one’s foot down is not a bad thing.
Maybe we should be putting that foot down more often and taking back control of our choices instead of letting someone or something else select them for us.
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