Make Jack-O-Lanterns From Fruit

Foremost among ancient symbols and practices of Halloween is the carving of Halloween Jack-o-Lanterns, a hollowed-out pumpkin given fanciful facial features, sometimes comical and more frequently frightening. It's something children wait for, and making a good one can take a considerable amount of time and effort. It can take a lot of strength to cut through a thick pumpkin rind and quite a bit of effort to remove the pulp and seeds and scrape the insides clean.

Luckily for those parents with impatient children, you can quickly and easily make little Jack-o-Lanterns from fruits such as watermelon, cantaloupe and honeydew melon, ones that can be completed in a couple of minutes with very little effort. Because they're so simple to construct, they can be made by children (as always, though, an adult should supervise when kids are using cutting implements). Best of all, the end result provides a tasty and healthy dessert, with no need to bake pumpkin pies to utilize the scooped-out innards.

Begin in the supermarket by picking out a nice-looking member of the melon family. Nowadays fruit never seems to go out of season, so there should always be something available to work with. Test to see if its bottom has an area flat enough for it to balance on so that it will sit upright on the table; watermelons in particular may need to be propped up in a bowl when they're done.

Once you're home, rinse it under cold water, then use a knife to cut the top off just as you would with a pumpkin-make sure that the cut angles in toward the center so that the top can be put back in place later without falling through. Once the top is removed, the inside pulp and the seeds can be quickly removed with a spoon or ice cream scoop.

Better yet, use a melon baller to extract the inner fruit. They're available in the housewares aisle of the supermarket for a few dollars and will produce snack-size pieces of melon that kids will gobble up. We produced a big bowlful from a honeydew melon that disappeared within half an hour of creation.

Carve a face on the side: Mouth, nose and eyes will be all you'll need. You're working on a smaller scale than most pumpkins offer, and it won't take any time at all to complete the face.

That's all there is to it. You've almost instantly created a small, but scary Halloween Jack-o-Lantern fit to be a centerpiece on that table at suppertime and made a dessert at the same time. The Jack-o-Melon won't last too long, so the next day you can slice it up and enjoy the rest of the fruit it contains; you can always make another one.

These melon Jack-o-Lanterns may not be completely traditional, but they're so easy to make that we bet they'll become a tradition in your family, one your children will remember and enjoy every time this ancient, haunted holiday celebration occurs.

Make your Jack-o-Melons as scary as you can, and have a great Halloween with your children. And remember the words of Robert Burns:

From ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties,

And things that go bump in the night Good Lord deliver us!

Article provided by Homesteader