Twelve Fall Activities, Rated
Who doesn't love Spooky Season? Leaves change color and fall to the ground as the trees begin their death-like slumber. It's the best time of year for dressing as both unspeakable horrors and sexy puns. And the thing that stalks the hallways of your dreams and itches at the corner of your eye draws ever closer.
Here are twelve popular Fall activities, ranked on a scale of 0 to 10 pumpkins! (Note: the pumpkins are not a qualitative measure. They’re their own thing, and I’m not sure what they want from me. They just showed up here, and I’m trying not to make them mad.)
Apple picking
5/10 Pumpkins
A strange way to play at labor that is often grueling and underpaid. On the plus side, apples are one of the best fruits, and it’s fun to think about the rootstock from seedy, mealy apple trees growing their resentment underground while they’re forced to feed the grafted limbs of a Honeycrisp.
One bonus pumpkin for the time Mr. T went apple picking with Conan O’Brien.
Hayrides
8/10 Pumpkins
Another staple of agritourism, a hayride is an excellent way to view and sit on hay (or straw) while you’re bounced around in a wagon being pulled by a tractor. You either like it or you don’t.
Bonus pumpkins for haunted hayrides.
Finding a doll with all of your baby teeth in its mouth
7/10 Pumpkins
Okay, there’s definitely an ick factor and a creep factor, so it gets a few pumpkins just for that. Who left it here? How do you know they’re your baby teeth? You shouldn’t. You don’t, really. But you do. You just know. The aren’t sharp at all, so how did you cut yourself so carelessly? It’s almost as if they bit you.
Drinking pumpkin spice lattes
7/10 Pumpkins
Look, by now it’s a cliché to call the PSL basic. Yes, I know there’s no pumpkins in it. I swear, there are no pumpkins in it. Please. What do they want from me?
Listening to “Season of the Witch,” by Donovan
7/10 Pumpkins
It says it right on the tin. Here’s a song that really lets you know what season it must be, which is that of The Witch.
Turning around and seeing the shuffling mound of all the hair you ever shed or cut
4/10 Pumpkins
It’s terrifying, yes, but it’s also super gross, and that's not my favorite. Why is part of it all wet and tangled like a shower clog? Oh no. Oh crap. It does have a mouth.
Watching scary movies
10/10 Pumpkins
Hot popcorn. Cold cider. Hundreds, even thousands of movies going back to the dawn of cinema that explore the breadth of human experience in quality ranging from the schlocky to the sublime in one of our most versatile artistic media.
Getting caught by the shaggy heap and realizing that it's full of all the nails you ever clipped, and that's how it will rend your flesh
2/10
Not a fan.
Guzzling cider!
10/10
Soft or hard, cold or hot, plain or mulled, there is no better autumn juice. I cannot stop drinking it. I literally cannot. I am plump with the sweet brown juice of this legendary fruit.
Watching a scary movie and hearing Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” on the soundtrack
11/10 Pumpkins
I don’t know how that extra pumpkin got in there. Are they multiplying? Surely not. When you pluck a fruit, does it yet live? If you bury it in damp, shallow earth, its seeds will surely split and sprout.
Getting saved from the shambling hair at the last minute by whatever it is that now wears all of your old dead skin cells. You don't know why they fight each other. You don't know why the skin thing saves you, unless perhaps it really is saving you, the way you're saving that box of Reese's Pieces in the back of the cupboard. You allow yourself a moment of relief, only for the feeling to curdle in your chest as you realize that the shambling mass will only grow larger and stronger with the passage of time. That night, you absent-mindedly reach for the nail clippers before stopping yourself. “Maybe I’ll grow them out a bit,” you think out loud. “Not Howard Hughes long, but.” You try to sleep, but you are beset by intrusive thoughts. You toss and turn, fluffing and shaping your pillow in vain, but you can't stop thinking about how many of your skin cells are crammed into it, tossed with the memory foam shreds like herbs on a salad. “The skin. Of course,” you say. Next time, it will be larger too. Stronger. And you'll be ready. The next day, you order a case of pumice stones. If the thing which wears your fallen skin is saving you for something, it had better earn it.
9/10 Pumpkins
Probably should get a new pillow.
Carving pumpkins
?/10 Pumpkins
Do they want this? Is that why they’ve come here? They make no move to stop me as I mark their skin with sharpie. Does the lineage of the squash only end when I roast and salt their seeds, so crunchy and warm? They have no faces, so we must gift them eyes, a nose, a jaunty mouth with crooked teeth. The features we give them- are they a cruel mockery of these smooth and vibrant squashes? Are they an expression of the pumpkins’ inner lives, or a mirror for our darkest selves?
Small tip: cut the hole in the bottom, instead of the top. It makes the candle easier to access and eliminates the lid line.