NaBloPoMo Day 8: The real spider in the fake pumpkin

My pop, a former elementary school principal, had a longstanding tradition of not giving out candy for Halloween. Yup, he was that guy. 

One year he gave pencils to the trick-or-treaters. He never did that again. 

Pop pivoted to what might be considered a truce— he started handing out plastic spiders. He bought the spiders from Oriental Trader in packs of one million. Growing up you could never celebrate a holiday or birthday without a few dozen spiders showing up as a gift, a decorative element on a gift, a cute napkin ornament, centerpiece detail, chandelier dangle, or if you looked closely at the Christmas tree you could probably find forty spiders tucked in the boughs. 

So when I first took this plastic pumpkin out of the basement to fill it up with candy and saw this:

I spy something inside this pumpkin.

My first instinct was to just leave it in there and maybe give it to a kid who looked like he/she might have a preference for a plastic spider. But then I switched up my strategy. We have two plastic pumpkins and I wound up using the other one for candy duty because it's bigger.

Fast forward to nine days after Halloween and at second glance… 

Zooming in.

It’s actually a real spider in that fake pumpkin. or maybe it’s a cricket. 

Either way, it’s dead. 

Not sure how this travail is going to conclude. I’ll either throw out the entire pumpkin, or dump the carcass on the lawn. 

Unless… is this a taxidermy spider now? Maybe I’ll wrap it up and give it to my pop for Christmas