Do You Paint or Carve Pumpkins with Your Charges?

7 Reasons To Paint Pumpkins
By Chris Yates, Kids Craft Magazine

One year I took the kids to a local farm where they sold really cute painted pumpkins for $30-$50 per pumpkin. Being a pretty crafty person, I decided that I wanted to try pumpkin painting on my own. Now we paint our pumpkins every year instead of carving them.

Sound strange? Well let me give you my top seven reasons to paint pumpkins and you might just become a pumpkin painter too.

1. Painting is a lot less work than carving.
With five of us in our family and each one of us needing our own special pumpkin, that is five pumpkins to cut open, clean, and carve each year. Plus the kids are too young to handle the knives themselves.

2. Kids can paint pumpkins all by themselves with very little help.
Even very young children can pick up a paint brush and paint their own pumpkins. That means that they aren’t idly standing by watching while Mom or Dad does the carving. They’re actively participating, designing, and enjoying their own pumpkin creation.

3. No sharp utensils.
Even with some of the safer pumpkin carving tools on the market today, pumpkin carving can still be dangerous for children. Pumpkin painting only involves the use of paint and paint brushes – no sharp objects needed.

4. Painted pumpkins last longer.
After you carve a pumpkin, you might get to enjoy it for a couple of days before it starts to rot, slump, and fall apart. Painted pumpkins, on the other hand, can last a really long time. If there are cool temperatures without any frost at night, we’ve had pumpkins last into the late Fall and early Winter.

5. Painted pumpkins don’t need a candles.
When you carve a pumpkin, you really need to put a candle or battery operated light into it and see it at night to get the full effect of carving it. Painted pumpkins don’t need an internal light. They can be seen from the light of your other decorations, and they look great in the daytime!

6. Painted pumpkins are much more versatile.
It’s much easier to make a painted pumpkin look like anything you want, while carving pumpkins limits most of us. It can take hours to carve an intricate design into a pumpkin to make it look the way you want. Painting is much quicker and easier.

7. Painted pumpkins are easier to embellish.
We’ve made painted pumpkins for Thanksgiving that were decorated with glitter, three little pig pumpkins for the beginning of the harvest season with wooden spool legs and pink pipe cleaner tails, and Halloween pumpkins with pine boughs sticking out for hair. Painted pumpkins are super easy to embellish with just about anything you can think of to make them fit your design.

Sure, you can still carve the occasional pumpkin, but it's so much easier if the majority pumpkin activities revolves around painting pumpkins.