Pumpkin Planetarium: The Great Jack-o-Lantern Blaze
November 12, 2018
The Great Jack-o-Lantern Blaze has been a popular Halloween event since 2005 (!), though I just learned of it this Halloween season. It is just the most wonderful kind of whimsy–thousands of pumpkins… hand carved and ablaze within Van Cortland Manor‘s grounds in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. Add spectacular lighting within the trees, an eerie soundtrack, along with the thoughtful displays of pumpkin artistry and you go sold out nights throughout the entire Halloween season. With a long weekend in our midst, we nabbed tickets for a cold Sunday in November, before they end for the season. Pumpkin art installation: here we come!
The music helps transport you into this one-of-a-kind magical pumpkin world. And you can even buy the soundtrack! 
Though the Tappan Zee Bridge is now named the Mario Cuomo Bridge, which we noticed on the way up, here it is the Pumpkin Zee Bridge.
Gorgeously carved Celtic knots, just a small sampling of the the over 7,000 pumpkins carved for the event.
Pumpkin spirit animals litter the Manor’s lawn
But I was most excited about the Pumpkin Planetarium! So excited a wore my star dress (pictured here in a dumb selfie as I waited to be picked up)… though you can’t really tell because it was freezing out. Like the first of the ‘Oh no, winter is really coming’ type cold. We had numb toes and fingers at the end of walking the pumpkin exhibits.
The Pumpkin Planetarium was even more magical than I expected. I didn’t want to leave the pumpkin starfield.
Taking back my stars
The light show was so well-done…
Pumpkin star gazers a-plenty.
Halloween is not over yet.
Pumpkin creepy crawlers
Chaos killed the dinosaurs, my dear
And how exciting for me, a field of sunflowers. Pumpkin sunflowers!
And these were a welcome site: typical style jack-o-lanterns 🎃
The path to the car… frozen and elated. What a spectacular event well worth the short drive from New York City. 
And Halloween is over… … now.
And here’s our meal, which I feel inclined to describe because there were so many “V”s on the menu… and because it was a bit awkward. We split the Avocado toast… which was one piece of toast cut into four… with guacamole scooped on it. Of course it was delicious, but that’s not really avocado toast. And that one piece of toast is not worth $10.
The sweet potato, quinoa and kale veggie burger was really yummy too, but the awkward service couldn’t grant my request that it be cut in half. Seriously, she dismissed my request rudely and said they didn’t have time to do that like I was an a child asking for cotton candy for dinner. W.T. heck?!
The way too wet jackfruit tacos. They needed to be cooked down much, much more. And there was way too much of this oddly textured, wet glob of jackfruit in each tortilla. I love that jackfruit is all about now, but not many are doing it right. (Doing it right like me in 2012. I really ought to do restaurant consulting.)