Halloween Pumpkins & a Rite of Passage

This may be the first Halloween in decades that I'm not carving a pumpkin. Talk about a rite of passage. We've gone through the baby costumes, the pint-sized pirates and wee witches, and then the gory, less-than-savory costumes. And my family has spent many a late October night carving pumpkins. But this year? Our youngest child is a high school senior and unless she suddenly gets the urge to carve up one of the beautiful, Martha Stewart-caliber squashes on the porch, this will be our first jack o'lantern-less year. And that's OK. We've decorated a little, we've got our stash of Reese's laid in and we'll welcome all those little trick-or-treaters with delight. But in many ways this feels like a turning point, an unexpected rite of passage into empty nesthood. And I'd be sad, had I not just read Peter Mayle's entertaining New York Times' piece on Halloween in France. "Do you mean to tell me," Mayles' French friend says in tones of utter outrage, "that pumpkins all over America are massacred, with all that good honest flesh tossed away, simply to provide a primitive decoration?" Don't those barbaric Americans know, he goes on, about pumpkin fritters and pumpkin risotto? Pumpkin gratin??

Ooo, merveilleux! Our failure to carve pumpkins this year doesn't stem from Halloween Grinchiness. We're being French! (We're also trying Mayles' friend's recipe for pumpkin risotto. And maybe whipping up some pumpkin chocolate chip bread too to pack off to our college kids.)