Viral jack o’lantern hacks are back in 2024, and I decided to try out a few that looked like they might actually work. I avoided obvious AI garbage such as, “cooking your pumpkin beforehand can make it easier to carve.” If you haven’t had time to slice up your seasonal gourd yet, here’s a few tested techniques that are treats—and some tricks posing as popular tips.
Treat: Using a dry erase marker is my new favorite way to stencil on a design. The viral hack suggests a red marker, which I didn’t have, so I used orange, pink, black and purple to see if every dry erase marker would work. It doesn’t. Pink and orange worked well. Even after leaving the pink marker design on all night long, the unwanted lines came off quickly and easily. A black dry erase marker left smudges. Purple also left a smear, though less noticeable than the black marker. The dry erase marker hack is a step up from the pencil, ink pen and permanent marker I’ve used in the past, and one I plan on using in the future.
Trick: De-seeding a pumpkin calls for using a hand mixer, but all I have is a stand mixer. The amount of flying seeds and pumpkin guts spread across my kitchen seems like a foretelling of the hand mixer’s effectiveness as well. If you decide to try this at home, I’d take the experiment outside—less kitchen clean up, just in case it also fails.
Treat: Punching out a design by whacking a cookie cutter into pumpkin flesh sounded like a great idea, and it mostly was. Simple metal cookie cutters (I used the smallest biscuit cutter) worked best. My metal goat-shaped cookie cutter took quite a beating. By the third attempted pumpkin goat, the outline’s back leg became lame. If your mom, like mine, has “good” cookie cutters, I’d use something else. A sturdy plastic cookie cutter could possibly cut into pumpkin flesh, but non-rusted metal cookie cutters likely will work best because of the sharper edge. You will need a mallet of some type. Pressing on and spinning the biscuit cutter didn’t slice into the gourd the way I hoped. Using both a mallet and biscuit cutter, I only needed a few moments to core a hole. A hammer might work, but likely would damage metal figures even more. This hack would be a great way to quickly carve a bunch of pumpkins for a fun Halloween display.
Trick: Supposedly, sprinkled cinnamon at the top of the pumpkin will warm in the candlelight and make your jack o’lantern and the area around it smell like pumpkin pie. I added cloves as well, partly because it’s another pumpkin pie spice and partly because it’s even more aromatic than cinnamon. This didn’t work at all. I let it burn for 20 minutes before I blew out the candle and called it a failure. The sprinkled spices closest to the candle burned and left a distinct “oops, I burned something on the stove” scent.
Treat: Traditionally, I cut the top of the pumpkin off, leaving the stem as a handle before scooping out the insides. Cutting the bottom off felt like writing left-handed, but it worked fine. The extra room allowed by cutting the bottom could give folks with dexterity issues space for maneuverability. I have a slight, but persistent, essential tremor in my hands. It makes fiddly work like carrying an extra full cup of coffee, knitting socks and slicing tiny pieces of pumpkin difficult. Scooping pumpkin guts and carving the jack o’lantern smile seemed a lot easier working from the bottom, especially compared to the top-chopped lantern I completed afterwards.
Most of the internet folks cite candle lighting as the main reason for cutting off the bottom of the pumpkin. You can light your candle and then place the jack o’lantern on top, instead of trying to light the candle from above and possibly burning your fingers. That’s true, but this isn’t an either-or decision. You made holes in the side of the pumpkin. It’s pretty easy to light a candle inside the gourd from whichever of the biggest holes you carved.
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