By Season Choose Your Adventure Halloween It's a Holiday It's Fall

Challenge Friends to a Virtual Pumpkin Carving Competition

We love going all out every Halloween. Two years ago we threw an epic Halloween party and last year we hosted an Addams Family themed dinner party, but this year we’re looking at ways we can celebrate Halloween with our friends virtually – and trust us, it not only can be done, it can be fun too.

Every Halloween we carve pumpkins – no matter the circumstances. So even though it’s looking like the kiddos may not be able to trick or treat this year due to the pandemic, you better believe we’re still gonna carve. I mean, you gotta make the best of a bummer situation.

Since we’re social distancing, we thought we’d take inspiration from our virtual Chopped competition and host a virtual pumpkin carving competition. Besides the pandemic, it’s also a great activity for long distance relationships, when you have family overseas, or just wanna make it a big group thing.

While we’re not that good with a carving knife, we’re firm believers that all you need is a little creativity and drive to create a really cool pumpkin. I mean, we look on Pinterest and realize some of the carving ideas are just a fail waiting to happen (you know the pumpkins that are shaved down to reveal the lighter orange flesh and then textured to create a really cool face? Yeah, we’re never gonna be able to do that). So, we always go with a fun, original and easy idea that involves limited actual knife use. Take our zombie baby pumpkins from last year for example. Point is, there are so many ways you can “carve” a pumpkin, so don’t be intimidated if you’re not Edward Scissorhands, you can win this thing.

An agreed upon competition timeline
A consensus on the rules, including how the pumpkins will be submitted and judged (we break down our recommendation below)
Pumpkin carving tools and/or materials
A willingness to get creative and competitive

1. Determine Your Timeline

Decide when you when you want the pumpkins to be submitted. We decided that we would have all competitors submit their pumpkins virtually between by 10pm ET on October 30, as generally people carve pumpkins to have out in front of their door by Halloween day.

2. Decide on the Competition Rules

Time to decide on some ground rules. For example, what constitutes a “carved” pumpkin? The rules are totally up to you to customize, but we recommend the following:

Set parameters on how many people can compete on one team. We recommend no more than four, dictated by household)
Determine what materials can and can’t be used. To encourage maximum creativity, we don’t recommend any rules here. So competitors can use multiple pumpkins if they wish, they can carve, they can not carve at all and/or they can use outside materials that aren’t pumpkins at all! That’s when you’ll get the wildest submissions.
How the pumpkins must be submitted. We had all competitors share a photo of their finished pumpkin along with a short description on Instagram (via grid or stories) by 10pm ET on October 30, tagging us and using the hashtag #BDOWPumpkinComp. You can take a much simpler route if you’d like and have all competitors share their photo in a WhatsApp Or Facebook group or chat.
Determine how you’ll judge the pumpkins. We recommend choosing the winning individual or team based on creativity, difficulty and overall presentation. We created a survey with photos on Get Feedback.
Once the survey is made you are given a link you can share with all competitors. However, a note about Get Feedback: you can only receive 20 votes if you’re using the free version of the service. Otherwise you have to pay an astronomical amount for a monthly account. The alternative is Survey Monkey (who actually owns Get Feedback), where you can get an account for about $40/month. But if you have more than 20 people competing we recommend only including the top 20 pumpkins (you as the host can act as an executive judge on which ones those are) to make it simple. We then gave competitors 24 hours to cast their vote on a scale of 1-5, crowning the winner on November 1. We announced the winner on Instagram, but if you have a more intimate group you can do so via email or text, or right on your group chat.

Time to get creative and squash (see what we did there?) the competition. Good luck! And if you’re reading this in October and want to participate in our competition, head over to our Instagram for the details on how to join in.