Jack the Pumpkinhead

A few years before I was born, my father got his job working at Hallmark Cards. This, more than anything else, shaped my childhood.

Growing up, my family celebrated EVERY holiday. We always seemed to have more decorations than we knew what to do with. My mother, a very crafty and creative person, would make some of them, but the majority came from Hallmark. At the end of a season, my Dad would snag a bunch of decorations at a discount, and we'd use them the following year.

We had stuff for all of them--I mean all of them. When I first brought my wife "home for the holidays" she was surprised to find out that my family had a menorah (my family is not Jewish, but Hanukkah is a holiday so we had the proper paraphernalia).

Of all the holidays we celebrated, the best was Halloween. That was my Dad's favorite holiday (it was his mother's favorite, too). Every year our house was transformed in a bizarre wonderland, complete with rubber bats, screeching haunted houses, paper skeletons, and foam pumpkins. Our parents would take us out trick or treating and when we came back my sister and I would have a gift waiting for us, usually in our rooms, left by "Jack the Pumpkinhead."

There have been two periods in my life. One period where I was embarrassed by this because I didn't know anyone else that got a little present on Halloween from "Jack," and another period where I thought "Well Linus [from PEANUTS] seems clued in on this so it must be more common."

I think that my Dad probably got this strange tradition from Charles Schulz when he saw IT'S THE GREAT PUMPKIN CHARLIE BROWN when it aired originally in 1966 (when he was six). I saw this cartoon a few nights ago, and I must say...it's quite subversive. I'm not sure if my father (and many others) picked up on Schulz's rather ironic Christmasification of Halloween, but growing up my household believed in Jack the Pumpkinhead.

Like most things, my father took what existed and sort of mixed it with something else entirely. You see, Schulz's characters talk about "The Great Pumpkin," whereas my father insisted that our family was visited by "Jack the Pumpkinhead." Who the heck is that? Jack the Pumpkinhead is a character created by L. Frank Baum in his 1904 novel THE MARVELOUS LAND OF OZ (yes, THAT Oz...you know, the one where Dorothy goes with Toto). I have it on good authority that my Dad was probably exposed to this book as a child (because growing up we had a beat-up copy of this book amongst our books that probably belonged to him...or my mother).

Thus, "The Great Pumpkin" was "Jack the Pumpkinhead" in our house.

I can recall getting several presents over the years, but only one honest-to-God "Jack" encounter:

My parents brought us home from Trick of Treating, and my sister and I started to take our costumes off. Suddenly, from the kitchen we heard a commotion. Running, with our pants down at our ankles, my sister and I got to the kitchen just in time to see my father dash madly out the back door. Yelling, he ran all the way to our back fence--hot in pursuit of something.

Horrified and excited, we waited for him to slowly make his way back into the house. He appeared worn-out and disappointed.

"Oh man," my dad told us. "You missed it! I almost caught Jack the Pumpkinhead!"

What? You did?

"Yeah, I caught him in the kitchen and ran after him--but he got over the fence before I could catch him."

Really?

"I almost got him," he said. "I was this close to catching him...but he got away. I could hear him laughing at me..."

Parents (and future parents) take note: this stupid, obvious bit of theater was 100% believed by both myself and my sister Amber. That's the power parents adults have over children (wield it justly). My Dad is not Daniel Day-Lewis, and yet I was (and still am) in awe of his performance. For the longest time I not only believed in Jack the Pumpkinhead, but I was convinced that my father had nearly caught him!

My wife (for obvious reasons) grew-up in a Santa-free household, and would no doubt be horrified by this story. Her family has this "thing about lying to children," but you know what? All adults lie to children, in some for or another. And beyond entertaining us, the lie did nothing to Amber or me. I don't still believe in this Halloween-Santa. I'm not devastated when he doesn't show up, now that my Dad isn't putting trinkets on my pillowcase.

It was just something fun and sort of magical from my childhood.

Of course, as an adult I see the real magic at play--the swirling of pop culture inside the mind of a goofy, 20-something-year-old father...how he waited for us to lower our guards, then go running across the lawn. Whenever I wonder where it is I get this strange capacity to create things (be it a Grape-Flavored Tear Drop poem or cartoon sheep), I always remember Jack and my Dad.