Erik At The Gates: Pumpkins!

For so many years I could not be bothered with Halloween. During my high school years I couldn't be bothered with even handing out candy. I didn't dress up in any costumes, I didn't go anywhere, I didn't even really eat any candy. The one single thing I looked forward to every year was the fact that in the evening the local NPR station would broadcast the original airing of War of the Worlds. I'd sit in a large easy chair and listen, doing my best to imagine the people panicking over a radio show and the power that these simple words had over masses at the time.

Now, to be fair, the Internet has stuff like that happening every day, except I don't think anybody would ever call Orson Welles a troll.

Once I got into my twenties, I started to appreciate the holiday a bit more. I still didn't dress up, though that partly came from disgust at the fact that even though I was so deeply into anime, I couldn't find a single character I could cosplay as because there just weren't that many tall guys with glasses in the programs I saw who didn't have costumes way outside my price range to assemble.

Yes, before you ask, I did have to look like the character, I wasn't going to try to dress as someone I looked nothing like because I wanted to capture the character.

These days, I'm more into the holiday. I own a few costumes (a few that I put together myself), I hand out candy, I watch the specials on TV (I swear, one day the Great Pumpkin will show up!), and I find myself volunteering at places to be the one to help decorate or be in charge of buying items for groups.

There is one thing, however, that I've done every year of my life but has only really become a true passion in the past few years: pumpkin carving.

These are a few of my carvings over the past few years.

One of the first real "character" pumpkins I ever did was Strong Bad from Homestar Runner. I loved that silly little Flash series, and the fact it's not continuing to this day makes me depressed. Of course, not many people can identify the character, so I tended to lie and say that he was "El Gourdo, the lantern luchadore."

Some of the more popular ones I did for neighborhood children were Nintendo characters. Everybody knows Mario, Bowser, and the Boos, but this year I did a Link one that I'm not sure as many people will get. I probably should have done a Triforce to go along with it.

Last year, I did a series of Avengers-based pumpkins, but this year I decided to go a bit more DC with some Bruce-Timm inspired characters from Batman.