If you have young kids without adult participation, hold a pumpkin painting contest instead. Pile enough pumpkins to fill each hula hoop in a spot several feet away from the hula hoops. Have the members of each team line up behind a hula hoop. On the start signal, the first players in line must push their wheelbarrows to the pumpkins, place one inside, and then wheel it back and place it inside of the hula hoop. If a pumpkin spills out of the wheelbarrow along the way, the player pushing it must go back and start again. The first team to fill their pumpkin patch wins. When you run out of parts of a jack-o-lantern but still have remaining number combinations for a pair of dice, make up silly tasks like “draw a nose on someone else’s pumpkin” or “switch your drawing with the person sitting to your left.” The first player to complete drawing a whole jack-o-lantern wins the game. Put on some music and have guests step from pumpkin to pumpkin as the song plays. Stop the music at random intervals. When the music is stopped, pull a number out of a pumpkin bucket and call it out. The person standing on that number is out. Continue playing like this until only one player remains. They are the winner. Another variation of this game is to have each player win a prize when their number is called. Once everyone has found their places on a pumpkin, start the music and mingling again. Remove one of the pumpkins from the floor and stop the music. Keep repeating this process and removing pumpkins, eliminating any players who don’t have both feet on a pumpkin when the music stops. The players who are left standing on the final pumpkin are the winners.
