The Dreyfuss family’s Thanksgiving dinner was ruined after grandchildren noticed a sizable amount of mold in the pumpkin pie. Shane, the youngest grandchild, began to cry after returning home from school and finding the Jack-O-Lantern gone from its place on the doorstep. After calming his histrionics, Grandma Dreyfuss extracted her pumpkin pie from the oven and was floored by a hideous stench of rotting pumpkin. The Jack-O-Lantern had found its way into the Dreyfuss pumpkin pie.
“Disgusting,” Jackie, the youngest granddaughter, said, as she looked upon the green pumpkin pie. “It’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.”
Angela Dreyfuss, the matriarch, cited Grandma’s failing vision as the prime factor behind the culinary catastrophe. Her pie-baking expertise had won the Barnard County Fair prize for over a decade straight, and her family cites the baked-in complacency of such acclamation as precedent for the catastrophe.
“Side by side, a fresh harvest pumpkin and a carved-up, squirrel-eaten jack-o-lantern look much the same,” she said, “although the ailing eyesight doesn’t explain how she missed the tactile sensations of a carved pumpkin versus an uncarved one.”
“I thought Frank carved holes in the pumpkin so it would be easier to cut,” Betty said. “Then he came up with the fresh pumpkin, and it all made sense.”
“It’s such a shame,” twelve-year-old Shane, the youngest grandchild, said. “There’s usually some delight in eating the pumpkin pie – and since it’s at Grandma’s house we will all be obligated to dig in. But I can see a garden growing out of my slice,” he said, as he reluctantly spun the slice in circles with a fork.
“We could cook another pie, which I’m sure the health inspector would approve of, but then we wouldn’t be able to eat it for Thanksgiving dinner,” Frank Dreyfuss, the patriarch of the clan, thundered across the table as Cardinal reporters frantically scribbled notes. “Tradition is valued in this household above all.”
“I hear a little bit of mold is good for you,” Frank Dreyfuss said, as he nonchalantly chewed his piece of moldy pie. “That’s how they make cheese, anyways.”
