It's one of those things with the pumpkin.

Probably nobody can say exactly when exactly the autumn fruits found their way into the home kitchens, on the balconies, in the front gardens.

Boiled, carved, or just draped on the windowsill.

With names like Hokkaido, Sweet Dumpling or Baby Boo.

In yellow, red, white and orange.

Pumpkins have long been an insider tip in the kitchen.

In the meantime, the variety of the domestic pumpkin market is almost infinite, also beyond the gastronomic possibilities.

Katharina Iskandar

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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There are pumpkins as small as tennis balls.

And huge, felt as big as a small car.

One can say that the pumpkin mania has spread in Germany.

Anyone who has ever been to a pumpkin market knows that it's no longer about who pulls the most beautiful fruit in the whole country from the field.

But also: most of them, the largest, the longest, the most unusual.

In short: the ones in front of which visitors stop in amazement and rub their eyes.

In 2006, according to the Federal Statistical Office, pumpkins were still grown on an arable area of ​​1217 hectares, in 2018 it was already 4150 hectares.

Ascending trend.

Upswing through Halloween

The pumpkin owes its popularity not only to its appearance and its vitamin content, but also to the Halloween boom that has found its way into Germany for years. There are now scary costumes and parties in every city. In Frankfurt, the night of November 1st even regularly calls the police on the scene, because the “trick-or-treating” tours degenerate into property damage in the worst case. The Halloween-pumpkin symbiosis would be so simple: While the pumpkin soup is simmering on the stove, the carved specimens stand outside the door and shine peacefully in the approaching darkness in which the families set off for "trick or treat".

Americans who live in the Rhine-Main area are watching the local pumpkin and Halloween trend with interest. So also the Frankfurt pastor Jeffrey Myers, who was the parish pastor of the old Nikolaikirche for many years and now in retirement looks after the church on the deaconess area in Frankfurt's Holzhausenviertel. He sees Halloween primarily as "a children's festival that carries the light into the dark autumn days". His tip: prepare a pumpkin soup or a pumpkin pie from the pulp of a hollowed-out, glowing pumpkin.

Whether carving a pumpkin in the family or doing the popular 'trick or treat' ”- for Myers, Halloween means“ community ”.

The festival can be used as an opportunity to do something charitable.

Last but not least, Halloween also invites you to “deal with the symbol of the pumpkin in Christian art”.

And the glowing fruit has another advantage: the setting up of carved pumpkins prevents an early Christmas party.

Flashing Christmas trees, according to Myers, are there soon enough anyway.