Pumpkins After Dark
For about a month now I’d been seeing advertisements on Facebook for something called “Pumpkins After Dark”.
Anyone that knows me probably knows that Hallowe’en is my favourite day /autumn my favourite season so of course I was attracted to the Ad.
It said that there would be over 6,000 hand carved pumpkins on display! WOW! So when I saw another Ad for it in our newspaper I decided to purchase tickets online and check it out!
The event took place at Borden Park to the east of downtown and we’ve been there before for a winter festival so I knew that there were sidewalks all through the area.
We had a fairly short wait in a lineup to get inside the park where you had the option of purchasing a treat at one of the many food trucks. We chose to head right on in and one of the first cool things we saw was a dragon that must have been made from about 250 carved pumpkins. And it even blew smoke from its mouth. There was a fellow juggling lit sticks to keep us entertained while we waited in line too.
I’ve never seen pumpkin carvings as intricate and incredible as the ones in the first pavilion that we walked by. The attention to detail was amazing and many of the themes were Hallowe’en related.
You can see that the jack o’ lanterns are out of this world.
After that first carving display stage we walked through display after display of pumpkin creations that had theme music to match.
Above you can see their nod to Jurassic Park, Hogwarts, The Day of the Dead, The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Jungle Book, and Toy Story. But there were many many many more displays around the park.
Finally we can up to a sort of pumpkin tunnel ……and that’s when we lost our enthusiasm for the event…
It was clear when we walked into the tunnel that these weren’t ‘real’ pumpkins nor HAND carved at all! They were clearly all lazer cut , plastic pumpkins. ;(
I just checked the website and it says (now that I look at it….)
“Q: Are the pumpkins real? A: We use a combination of craft and real pumpkins throughout the event. Every pumpkin is hand-carved by Canadian artists, using 2D and 3D techniques.”
So for us it took away from our amazement. That said, it certainly was a family friendly event and there were tons of people taking it in with smiles on their faces. (You couldn’t see our faces because we were wearing masks. We still want to be careful with Covid looming closer again.)
We chose the right night for it because it was very mild and we only had to wear jackets with sweaters. Some people didn’t even have that and they were pretty cold…ha ha.
So there you have it. I think it would be a good event to take the children or grandchildren but we don’t need to return next year.