Pumpkin Carving 2025

Happy Halloween! 

The time has come around again for my favorite little tradition: pumpkin carving! And it just so happens that this year, we combined our love of reading with our love for spooky season. Can you guess what books inspired our pumpkins this year? Hint: my apparel is a clue. Keep scrolling to see what I mean.

After sitting outside on our front porch for a couple of weeks, our pumpkins were positively frosty when we brought them in last night for our annual fun. We both agreed that digging out nearly frozen pumpkin guts while sitting next to our cozy fire is exceedingly preferable to hot, steamy ones, something we've experienced a time or two in Florida Octobers. 

Can you make out Cody's design? Back at the beginning of March this year, Cody and I began reading the Harry Potter series aloud together. As you know if you've been around a while, I read Harry Potter for the first time back in 2019 and ended up loving them. Cody had read the first four books prior to this year, but had never read Order of the Phoenix, the Half-Blood Prince, or the Deathly Hallows. At the beginning of October, we started the final book in the series, so when we were deciding what to carve on our pumpkins this year, I had the brilliant idea to make them Harry Potter themed. Cody immediately got on board.

The result?

Cody decided to do the Sign of the Deathly Hallows, very apropos. I attempted Harry's messy hair, spectacles, and signature lightning bolt scar. We did both of these freehand—no stencils—and I just love how they turned out. 

We put Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone—my favorite of the film adaptations—on the TV while we carved, lit our glass pumpkin candles from the Dollar Tree, set up next to a cozy fire, and had a marvelous time of it. After our pumpkins were finished and we took them back outside to see how they looked all lit up, we made some hot chocolate and snuggled in to watch Harry discover the wizarding world. A successful night all around, I'd say, and certainly another successful year of our fun tradition. 

From us to you, a very happy Halloween and a jolly start to the holiday season. Can you believe there are only 61 days left in 2025? 

October 30, 2025

Pumpkin Carving 2024

Happy Halloween! 

We're taking a break from book recaps today for our annual pumpkin carving post! This year's pumpkin carving was extra-fun and extra-chaotic because four of our favorite girls are staying with us for a couple weeks. They (and their parents) are in the middle of flipping a house—in another state!—to move in to and so we naturally demanded that they come stay with us while their parents are in the midst of closings and packing and moving and unpacking and all that goes along with it. The last time we got to carve pumpkins with these fabulous nieces of ours was back in 2020 so it was about time we did this again.

This year, we decided to throw paint into the mix and what we ended up with was one pumpkin just carved, no paint. Two pumpkins just painted, no carving. And three pumpkins carved and painted. It was a mess, but it was a fun mess and I hope these girlies always remember Halloween 2024 with Uncle Cody and Auntie Hannah. 

Uncle Cody came in clutch with a silly dad joke. We all had gotten busy taking the tops off our pumpkins and cleaning them out, with Uncle Cody on hand to assist, but his own pumpkin was nowhere in sight. The girls and I kept pestering him sweetly asking him when he was going to start his pumpkin and what he was going to do, but he said he was waiting for the inspiration to hit. When it finally did, he ended up painting his pumpkin and finishing before all of us. Typical. I decided to commemorate this special year by carving 2024 and four hearts to always remember carving pumpkins with our four sweethearts.

Our creative girls ended up with an upside down melty ice cream cone, Agnes and Lucy from the Despicable Me franchise, and Bluey. 

I absolutely adore how these silly, colorful pumpkins turned out, and I wouldn't trade one second of the mess or the chaos or the resulting cleanup and exhaustion. These pumpkins may end up on our Christmas card. The brainstorming and giggles and paint-covered hands (and faces!) are memories I'll treasure forever.

Have fun trick-or-treating tonight or just stuffing yourself with candy or whatever it is you do in your neck of the woods!

October 30,

Pumpkin Carving 2023

It's spooky season and you know what that means: time to carve up some pumpkins. For the past few weeks up here in beautiful western North Carolina, the leaves have been changing colors and it's been freezing, but over the weekend we had some very warm days which meant that yesterday we put on short sleeved t-shirts and went outside to carve our pumpkins in the welcome sunshine and crunchy leaves. Hallelujah! (Today, unfortunately, it is freezing again.)

<scooping pumpkin guts and carving them up>

This year we decided on bats. Creepy, sinister, Halloween bats. Cody went for a classic bat flying out of a cave kind of look. I went for a scary bat perching on a skull. I think they both turned out great, but I really love how Cody's looks lit up. 

(When you look at my pumpkin, what do you see first: the bat or the skull?)

Happy Halloween!

October 30, 2023

Pumpkin Carving 2022

Guess what time it is? That's right. Time for our annual pumpkin carving post. And let me tell y'all, this year—and the last few months in particular—have been so busy that it almost didn't happen in time for Halloween. I was in Florida last week for a wedding, and when I got home, I was hoping to carve our pumpkins on Sunday because I was 100% positive that Sunday was, in fact, Halloween. Seriously. I would have bet you good American money that yesterday was November 1st. So I was trying to figure out how to carve like, a turkey or a cornucopia or something Thanksgiving-y into my pumpkin (because we can't throw the whole tradition out just because we're a day late) when my sister-in-law called me and helpfully reminded me that it wasn't November yet. 

So after Cody was done with work yesterday and we'd had a super-yummy dinner, we found our pumpkin carving tools (no small feat in our recently moved into basement) and kept our Halloween pumpkin carving tradition alive. And since I mentioned it: we carved our pumpkins in the basement of our sixth (and hopefully last because I never want to move again) home-sweet-home together. 

I like him.

It's becoming one of my favorite parts of this tradition to look back at all our pumpkins of years past and reminisce about where we were and what was going on in life that year. This year, we had a lot going on. We bought our second home and moved for the second time in a six-month period. We joined our church in North Carolina. I quit my job delivering packages for amazon and started watching a baby boy from church a couple days a week. Cody traveled most of the summer for work and also went on a missions trip to the Republic of Georgia. We {semi}renovated our basement and moved the rest of our stuff into our house (which felt like the third move in the span of a year and a half). It's been wild, but it's been good, and I'm thankful to God for all His good gifts to us and that I'm still carving pumpkins with this guy eleven years later. 

This year, Cody picked up a couple of jumbo pumpkins from Ingles and we kept it simple with some classic jack-o'-lantern faces. I think these are the biggest pumpkins we've ever gotten!

Happy Halloween or November 1st or Thanksgiving Day, for all I know! 

I hope you're enjoying the sweet things wherever you are. 

October 31, 2022

Pumpkin Carving 2021

Y'all. We've been carving pumpkins together for a decade. Ten years of keeping this fun tradition; a milestone that bears a little reflection. 10 years, 5 different homes, 2 states. Going to pumpkin patches, fall festivals, or just grocery stores to find the perfect pumpkins. Picking out fun patterns each year and adding two cuddly dogs to the mix. In looking back over the last ten years, we've decided our favorite pumpkins were in 2017 (the eek! and Hawaiian monster face) with Cody's second favorite being the globe he carved in 2015 and my second favorite being the "boo" ghost I carved in 2016. 

This was our first year in North Carolina, carving pumpkins in the little green house we've been living in down the street from my parents. (SPOILER: We bought a house! Next year we'll be carving pumpkins in our new home sweet home.) This year we decided to go with a black Halloween cat theme for our pumpkins and they turned out super cute.

Here we are with our blank slates. We got our pumpkins at Sam's Club this year, and they were the perfect size for carving.

Cody made us a roaring fire (because we live in North Carolina now and it's cold, y'all), and we had a mini-marathon of Psych Halloween episodes while we carved (Scary Sherry: Bianca's Toast S1E15, Tuesday the 17th S3E15, In Plain Fright S5E11, This Episode Sucks S6E3, for any interested parties).

Cody even carved the top of his pumpkin into a cat head (bottom right).

The glowing finished products. Mine is the cat walking along the fence and Cody's is the black cat under a crescent moon. We were down to the wire this year, carving them at 10:00 on Halloween night but it was the perfect cozy way to spend our first Halloween in the mountains. 

October 31, 2021

Happy Fall, Y'all!