The Story of the Pumpkin Thieves

Picture from Halloween 2008

I have realized that alot of great stories from my childhood come from Halloween. See here. I was thinking of the following story as I was trying to decide if I should put my pumpkins out yet.

I am pretty sure that I was in the fourth grade, as I was getting ready to really wow everyone at school as a vampire, (that's another story) I noticed through my window that a red pick up truck had pulled up to our house. Curious, I watched to see who it was coming to our house so early on Halloween morning. Two girls jumped out and as they got closer to the door and out of my sight, I waited for the doorbell to ring. It never rang. I looked back out the window just in time to see those two girls running down the sidewalk with our freshly carved pumpkins. I ran to my mom yelling "someone is stealing our pumpkins!" Like a good mom would do, my mom went running outside in just enough time to get a good look at the truck and get the license plate number.

We went to school and went along with the festivities that Halloween and school have to offer, not knowing that my mom was on an all out search for those pumpkin thieves. After she dropped us off she drove to the local community college and drove around the parking lot looking for the red truck, it wasn't there. I don't know if she went anywhere else that day, but I know that she did end up driving around the high school parking lot. She came across the red truck in the parking lot complete with the pumpkins in the bed of the truck. She wrote a note saying where she lived and that she wanted the pumpkins returned immediately. I'm sure the note had some type of "or else" ending.

To make a long story short, that Halloween night we had our pumpkins returned to us and to make it more awkward they dumped off every pumpkin they had taken that morning at our house. My mom wrote a note by the pumpkins saying if any of these are yours, please take them. No one really claimed the pumpkins and I was so worried that the trick or treaters would think that we had taken them. To anyone that lived close by me in the early nineties and had your pumpkins stolen, we did not take your pumpkins, just know that my mom rescued them.

What a good mom, little things like carved pumpkins meant alot to me and she knew that. I hope that nothing like that ever happens to Kate, but if it does I hope she will have a tough mom to make it all better.