Pineapple Carving Is The New Pumpkin Carving

With Halloween fast approaching, you may be getting ready to deck out your porch with pumpkins, but your fall carving doesn’t have to be limited to gourds. Did you know that you can carve pineapples into jack-o’-lanterns? You may not automatically associate the tropical fruit with autumn, but it turns out that these prickly, sweet plants are perfect for carving and filling with tea lights.

As this video about how to carve pineapples illustrates, making your very own pineapple-o’-lantern is simple. Start by cutting off the top and hollowing out the inside of the fruit. Remove the juice, and dry it out with a towel. Use a pumpkin carving knife to cut out a face (or whatever design you choose), add a tea light, and pop the top back on. Bam! Your very own fruity lantern.

One thing I like about this process is that you don’t have to waste any pineapple to make your jack-o’-lantern — in fact, it lets you use parts of the pineapple (the rind and top) that you’d normally end up throwing away. You might not be able to carve as fancy a design as you would in a pumpkin (Seriously, some of those pumpkins are insanely intricate), but what you lose in detail, you make up for in funky texture and a built-in punk hairstyle. Just look at how cool the light looks against the skin of these pineapples:

A pineapple-o’-lantern won’t last as long as the usual pumpkin; in fact, it’ll probably need to be thrown out after a day or two. But that’s just long enough to have a few on display at this year’s Halloween bash — and you can use all of the fruit and juice you removed to make some fun, tropical cocktails. Sounds like a party to me.

Image: Leon Neal/Getty Images