ABOUT ME
ABOUT ME
my story
My name is Daniel (Dan The Pumpkin Man) and I’ve been carving high quality pumpkins for over 10 years, adding to my own personal collection every year. I now have over 220 pumpkins on display every October at my house in Roseville, CA.
I got into pumpkin carving as a kid when my dad bought one of the “Pumpkin Masters” carving kits with the plastic tools, small blade, and multiple pumpkin patterns. I loved trying a new pattern every year and going with harder and more complicated carves each time.
Fast forward a few years and when it was my son’s first Halloween, I wanted to relive my childhood and carve a fancy pumpkin for my son to enjoy. As I was looking for patterns online, I found one from his favorite TV show at the time, Phineas & Ferb, on Stoneykins.com and decided to try carving it in a foam pumpkin that Stoney recommends. I carved that first foam pumpkin with only the pattern and an X-Acto knife with a lot of replacement blades!
After a couple weeks of carving I had finished my first 2 pumpkins, Phineas & Ferb in their backyard, as my first, and Isabella asking “Whatcha Doin?” as my second. I still have both pumpkins displayed every year and you can see pictures of them in the gallery and from the displays over the years.
the pumpkin house
After that first Halloween I discovered more patterns and better ways of carving, using an Dremel and different bits to make the process faster, though messier, and I kept adding to the display and collection every year. When we hit 50 pumpkins at our house in Minnesota, we started hearing our house be referred to as “The Pumpkin House” by all the kids during trick or treating and realized that we had become a part of the Halloween tradition in our neighborhood.
Over the years we continued to add more pumpkins and shelving to handle them all and loved meeting new people and hearing how much they and their kids loved seeing all the pumpkins each year. Many parents have told us that they used the pumpkins to get their kids to practice counting, coming by every week to count how many new pumpkins had been added or count what the total number is in the display.
Our number of trick or treaters continues to grow every year, with close to 200 kids visiting on Halloween, and to see the look of joy and awe on the face of a 3-4 year old who is seeing the display for the first time and then finding their favorite Disney or Movie character as it is what keeps us going to expand the display every year.
My wife and son love Halloween as much as I do and help setup and put away the display each year along with new ideas on what patterns to carve or other improvements for the display. There are even a few pumpkins that my son had carved himself in the last couple years, though I haven’t gotten my wife to carve a foam one yet, only real ones.
Last year (2020) we added a suggestion box for everyone to provide new ideas on what to carve and collected donations for the local county food bank, raising over $250 in donations from people who came to see the display!
the process
Each pumpkin has been carved by hand with most taking 1.5-3 hours for the full process, with the more complicated and photo realistic patterns taking over 10 hours of carving to complete.
