Design Happens

BRIANA: It’s fall and Thanksgiving is fast approaching, which can only mean one thing to many outfitting their home for the holiday: IT’S DECORATIVE GOURD SEASON, [EXPLETIVE]! (I shant include a direct link here due to the column’s use of strong language, but if you don’t get this reference, I suggest you coughcough search for it on McSweeney’s coughcough).

So, decorative gourds: Festive fall must-have or tacky tradition?

LIZ: Well…this is happening in my entryway:

So…yeah. As high-brow as I might try to be, there’s just something about buying a bunch of pumpkins and gourds that feels so…seasonal. See, there’s even a bird in my house! All my (alleged) principles evaporate when fall happens. I still skip the shellac and cornucopias, though.

MARIANNE: Yeah, I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for a decorative gourd. This year I stuck to projects that would work for Halloween or Thanksgiving, so I could maximize the squash potential.

GRANT: Okay, your boy isn’t crafty. But even I can recognize the crazy cuteness of gourd vases and candy corn gourds.

LILI: Fine, I will say it! Gourds – everything about them, from their name to their looks – make me titter. No matter how beautifully they are arranged or decorated…

…all I can see is misshapen hunks of vegetable (fruit?) that should have just been thrown away. Go ahead, throw your gnarly squashes at me now.

[time passes]

Addendum: Just try and tell me this thing doesn’t give you nightmares!

LIZ: It’s Gourd-zilla! Send in the reinforcements:

I bet if you stuck a face on that sucker, it would suddenly turn cute. Okay, ugly-cute. But still. Exhibit B*:

*This may or may not have happened in my kitchen.  But let’s be honest, it did.

BRIANA: WOW, Lili. My fiancé and I watched The Thing on Halloween and that blob definitely looks like a parasitic extraterrestrial lifeform from a 1980s sci-fi/horror classic.

Speaking of which, even though decorative gourds are supposed to be timeless/traditional/pilgrim-y, they still seem very ’80s to me. Maybe because my mom actually had a wicker cornucopia and used to shellac her own gourds to put inside it back then. Yes, the Mowrey house was all mallard duck phones and shiny squash in the ’80s. Thankfully, mom seems more about autumn foliage these days, and leaves the pumpkins to her rockin’ pies.

LIZ:  They are totally ’80s! Yet my love apparently knows no bounds.

BRIAN PATRICK FLYNN: I think they look contagiously diseased and lady-witch-nose-wart-ish. But I kinda like the color of gourds, plus their shapes are graphic.

We’ve harvested some opinions about harvest decor, now tell us what YOU think:

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