The library hosted their Bookish Pumpkins Contest, a contest that had participants decorate plastic pumpkins based on a book, during the month of October. All pumpkins had to be submitted by Oct. 31st. The winning pumpkins were based on “The Ballad of Never After” and “Star Wars”, which won “Most Creative” and “Most Adorable”, respectively.
The library drew inspiration from other school libraries, who had the idea of decorating pumpkins to reflect the world of a book or a book character, librarian Mia Gittlen said.
“It’s the second year that we’ve sponsored a Halloween contest in a row, and last year we did the Halloween book nooks,” Gittlen said.
Senior Paarth Pandit made one of the winning pumpkins, which was based on the character BB-8 from “Star Wars.” He never took the pumpkin home and decorated it in the library, Pandit said.
“With all the materials they had, I used eyeballs, pipe cleaners for the antennas, and I used sketch markers for the design,” Pandit said.
The pumpkin that was based off of “The Ballad of Never After” had broken hearts and looked like a strawberry, senior and library TA Yvonne Nguyen said.
“It (novel) is a trilogy, so they included the titles of all the three books on the pumpkin,” Nguyen said.
The two officially submitted pumpkins were considered for awards, as some were incomplete, Gittlen said. The library had decided the winning categories earlier in the month, so they looked at the submitted pumpkins and granted the awards, she added.gf
“We did have some extra ones, like scariest and silliest,” Gittlen said.
The library hosted some workdays for participants to decorate the pumpkins on the last Monday and Wednesday of the month, Gittlen said.
“I think that might be one of the reasons that participation dropped off;we waited until towards the end of the contest,” Gittlen said. “Something like this can take a lot of time for people to decorate.”
Seventeen students signed up and took pumpkins, Gittlen said.
“The first ones that we ordered were too tiny,” Gittlen said. “This was the bigger size—still affordable to give them out at no fee, without it being too pricey.”
The designs of the pumpkins were beautiful, and it was fun to see the abstract interpretations of the books, Gittlen said.
“The shape of a pumpkin forced people to be really creative about how to make it into something that reflects the book,” Gittlen said.
One of the reasons why the library chose to do the Bookish Pumpkins Contest was because it would be lower maintenance for the participants, Nguyen said.
“You just decorate it and turn it in if you’re interested,” Nguyen said.
The library wants to encourage students to do activities that encourage creativity and potentially win prizes as a result, Nguyen said.
“I think this definitely helped us, like, have an idea of what to plan in future for events or small little activities like this,” Nguyen said.
