Kidnap the Magic: Disneyland Jack-o-Lanterns

Okay, help me out here. When did Halloween pumpkin carving become so...awesome? When I was a kid, riding my giant ground sloth to the playground, everyone I knew just drew a few triangles and circles on a pumpkin and cut them out with a kitchen knife. I felt fancy if I managed to include pupils in the eyes. I remember starting to see those specialty carving kits with the gnome-sized miter saws when I was in my teens,* and sometime between then and now, it just exploded as an artform.

Pumpkin has become a medium of sculpture in its own right—a feat all the more impressive when you remember that these globoid gourds are available only seasonally and the resulting creations are necessarily ephemeral. Despite its fragility, in the hands of an expert carver the flesh of a pumpkin can hold fine details as well as soft wood, and its translucency allows for subtle shading effects that only become apparent when the candle inside is lit. At the extreme end, we get stuff like this:

Most people probably don't have it in them to create anything that elaborate—I know I don't—but “rough image of a face” is no longer the default. Between the aforementioned carving kits and the widely available pattern templates, even the average neighborhood candy-giver is as likely to have pumpkins carved to resemble miniature scenes, or favorite media characters, as simple faces.

And occasionally, they turn to a Disney theme park for inspiration.

Disney jack-o-lanterns, per se...those are everywhere. Always quick to jump on the bandwagon of anything child-focused, Disney prints loads of pumpkin templates, in little booklets themed by character family. You've got your Mickey & Friends, your Princess, your Winnie The Pooh, your Pixar, probably your Jake and the Neverland Pirates. If you want a design specifically related to the parks, though, you're on your own. Naturally.

Nonetheless, some people pull it off, and it is my very great pleasure to show you some examples of their work. I had to work a bit harder than I anticipated (with some much appreciated help from The Sister) to collect all these...it turns out that Googling “Disneyland jack-o-lantern” doesn't bring up many examples of homemade carvings by private citizens.

So without further ado...

Notes on the Fandom: Clichés and Axioms

I adore Disneyland like little else in my life, but I have to admit that the fandom can be...difficult. For me, at least. It's a thing apart from every other fandom I have ever gotten involved with, probably because it's based on a fixed location rather than a piece of easily reproducible media, but my area of concern today is the way the discussions tend to go.

I'm only “active” on one Disneyland discussion forum, that being the one on Micechat, and the scare quotes are because I rarely find it in me to join the conversations there. They're just...so...repetitive. Trip reports (not much to add there), news items, requests for advice from people about to make their first visit (others have usually gotten there long before I see the thread), and the ever-popular debates about the sorts of attractions Disney should add to their parks vs. the sorts they do add.

That last category of conversations are the really frustrating ones, because they have possibly the highest potential for fruitful discussion, but the lowest actualization of that potential. Most of what I see is factions of people arguing past each other. As is usually the case when people are more interested in waving their opinions about like magic talismans than actually communicating with each other, there are certain stock phrases that appear over and over. Today I've chosen to highlight four that I think are especially poisonous and would be discarded by a wiser fandom. I've been guilty of using some of them myself.

Some of these clichés and axioms, I would like to banish from the overall conversation because I disagree with them, others because I feel they convey my own positions badly. But we would be better off without all of them, as a general rule, because they are less thoughts than substitutes for thought.