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 Pumpkins
are a huge symbol of Halloween! You can carve them, bake them, decorate
with them and eat the seeds! The Jack-O-Lantern started as an old Celtic
custom on Samhain, using a turnip carved out and filled with a glowing
coal. Now days, we carve pumpkins and use candles or battery powered
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Worlds Largest Pumpkin Festival
 Have
you ever seen thousands of jack-o-lanterns all grinning back at once? At the
Downtown Keene Pumpkin Festival that is exactly what you see! Towers of pumpkins fill the
downtown skies with grinning and scary faces. The Pumpkin Festival is clearly the most
famous of Center Stage Cheshire County events. The Festival was featured on CNN
Headline News as well as many network stations throughout the United States. In the
year 2000 over 40,000 people came to view the jack-o-lanterns; a record for Keene and the
world, 23,727 pumpkins! That's enough pumpkins to win
the Festival a place in the Guinness Book of Records for a tenth year. Children dress in
Halloween costume and trick-or-treat in the Downtown stores along Main Street which is
closed to traffic. Besides walking from pumpkin to pumpkin; hay rides, pumpkin
mobile rides and fire engine rides provide another way to experience the wonder of the
evening and to gain some perspective on exactly what thousands of pumpkins in one place
really look like. The center attraction is the jack-o-lanterns, carved by children,
teens, adults, corporations, and municipalities. Some are masterful artistic
creations, other make you smile, some are so incredible you can't imagine how they are
carved. There are grinners, frowners, frightful witches, creepy spiders and bizarre
masks. Some have a child's names or business carved in them, one letter per pumpkin,
for all to see. The sight of all those flickering faces is awesome.
Everyone carving jack-o-lanterns signs a Guinness
log book, becoming an official part of the record-breaking attempt. The pumpkins are
counted by Keene’s Mayor and a local certified accounting firm and when the number is
announced the excitement is infectious and instantaneous. A fireworks display caps the
evening.
The 2001 Pumpkin Festival will be held
October 27th, 2001, beginning at 10:00 AM. Sponsors are the Cheshire Medical
Center and the Hitchcock Clinic - Keene, New Hampshire.
December 2000 -
Photo collage of the 1997 Pumpkin Festival courtesy of
Michael Leonard (mleonar1@maine.rr.com)
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Every
year, Halloween enthusiasts anxiously await the retail
industry to begin their Halloween season and see who's
first to stock products for the spooky season. Many
stores begin stocking Halloween products as early as
July! |
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