CYPRESS : Kids Make Faces in Halloween Contest

There were two-faced pumpkins. Pumpkins with scars. Others sporting blood-dripping fangs.

Some had hair. A few had one eye, or 13 eyes, or no eyes at all.

There were naked pumpkins, clothed pumpkins and just plain orange pumpkins.

Whatever they looked like, all were the creations of dozens of children who came to Forest Lawn Memorial Park on Wednesday for the annual Great Halloween Pumpkin Decorating Contest. Droves of children from preschool to sixth grade came to the cemetery just three days before Halloween to create the Great Pumpkin.

“We started (the contest) about 20 years ago in our Covina park,” said J. Carol Winn, education affairs director for Forest Lawn. “It was so successful we decided to bring it here.”

In fact, this was the second year that the memorial park has held the decorating contest, which rewards especially creative pumpkin designers with prizes.

The Halloween event is one in a series of offshoots of Forest Lawn’s long-held Valentine’s Day contest, in which children come to the cemetery to make Valentines. The park has also recently started a Mother’s Day competition.

Though a cemetery seems a strange place to have children make Mother’s Day cards or decorate pumpkins, the children didn’t seem to notice. These were kids on a mission.

Oblivious of the grave sites that they were running past and sometimes over to get to their destination, the children happily raced from their parents’ cars to get to the makeshift pumpkin patch set up at the base of the Ascension Mausoleum.

Anthony Hernandez, 10, who found out about the contest from an aunt, was one of the early arrivals and sat anxiously awaiting the start of the contest. He then spent several minutes carefully etching a face with black crayon. He chose an evil look, with slanted eyes, scars and a gaping mouth full of fangs. When he was finished, it looked more like a vampire than a pumpkin.

Anthony, who is going to dress up this Halloween as a wizard, said being in a cemetery didn’t bother him, as long as the lights were on. “Only at night I would mind,” the fifth-grader said.

Jane Smiros brought her 6-year-old daughter, Stephanie, to the competition. She thought it would be fun for her. And besides, they would get to take home the pumpkin. “It’s not often things are free anymore,” Smiros said.

Officials at Forest Lawn view the Halloween event and the others as a way to ease children into a fact of life--death.

“This helps them later on when they have to deal with death,” Winn said. “When they come to the park and had a happy experience it helps them emotionally.”

However, all of that seemed lost on Anthony, who carefully plotted his winning strategy for next year as the winners paraded in front of the group with their prize dolls, soccer balls and Chinese checker games. “I am going to draw all year and practice,” he said as his mother laughed.