The Story of Paul Pumpkin

Paul the pumpkin 
and Robert.

       This is a story of a pumpkin who went to a Thanksgiving dinner. It happened this way ... Oh, yes, you will say, he went as a pie. He didn't go as a pie. Well, then, he went as a bee-oo-ti-ful dish to hold fruit in the center of the table. No, it wasn't that at all. He went as a regular guest. 

       Once upon a time, on the edge of a great corn field, there lived the boy Robert with his father and his mother and no brothers or sisters at all. After school and on holidays he had no one to play with. His friends, you see, went home after school. So he made a play friend out of Paul Pumpkin. 

       Paul was a pumpkin boy, chubby and jolly. He lived in the great corn field with a father and mother and twelve brothers and ten sisters. 

       Paul was very different from his brothers and sisters after Robert made a friend of him. He looked almost like a boy on the outside, if you did not look too hard at his head. Robert had put him on a stick and found a suit for him. 

       Day after day Paul Pumpkin and the boy played together. When it came near Thanksgiving, Robert told Paul Pumpkin that he wanted him to come to his house for Thanksgiving dinner. Paul Pumpkin laughed like the jolly boy that he was and nodded his head up and down, which meant that he would come, thank you. 

       In his own mind, what there was of it, he thought, "He means that I am to go as a pie." But Paul Pumpkin did not object to that. It would be an honor to be made into pumpkin pie. 

       But when Thanksgiving Day came, the boy had a place for Paul Pumpkin at the table. He sat there like a real guest and had his plate of good dinner to be thankful for, just like the rest.

       He made them all laugh when he thought that mashed potatoes were cotton batting. His suit had been stuffed with cotton batting. 

       He thought that the two looked just alike. He thought the turkey was a log of wood and the cranberries the red leaves of the sumac. And he asked if the carrots were pretty pebbles from the brook with butter on them. 

       After the dinner was over, he went back to his large family in the corn field and whispered great tales to them about the things he had seen and heard that day. You could hear the whisper among the sheaves of corn until far into the night. He was still whispering his tales when the boy Robert went to sleep. And all the pumpkins in the corn field looked very sleepy the next morning. Marion LeBron