We are now a few weeks into October and as the Game of Thrones meme foretold, the pumpkin invasion is here. All of your favorite beverages have pumpkin flavors, all of your favorite sweets have pumpkin flavors, and all of your favorite celebrities have admitted to having sex with a pumpkin. Obviously I made that last one up, but can you imagine? You will now.
Pumpkins will dominate our lives from now until the the last crumb of pumpkin pie is wiped from the lips of a self-loathing American who swore they’d be “good.” I did some intense research to find the root of our pumpkin obsession, by which I mean I spent about 10 minutes on Wikipedia. Turns out you need a lot of pumpkins to churn out all those spiced lattes; every year 1.5 billion pounds of pumpkins are harvested in the U.S.A. in late September/early October, just in time for the two biggest holidays of the year. It’s almost as if a secret society was bombarding us with pro-pumpkin propaganda so we’d eat genetically modified pumpkins that brainwash us into tearing through Thanksgiving dinner like a coked-up Pac Man, and then running out to buy Christmas gifts at midnight. If there are any conspiracy theorists reading this, feel free to run with that while I finish this post.
Other interesting things I learned about pumpkins include punkin chunkin, the art of building contraptions specifically designed to slingshot pumpkins as far as possible. Yes, there are people who actually sit around figuring out how to fling pumpkins like bumpy orange missiles, and organize the World Championship Punkin Chunkin in Delaware the week after Halloween. It’s nice that Delaware has something going for it other than being mentioned in a Simpsons episode once. Dozens of pumpkin festivals held every year across the country, many of which have “heaviest pumpkin” competitions. The Guinness world record for heaviest pumpkin is currently 2,032 lb. No word on whether they tried to slingshot it across a football field.
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