Real Halloween

Anne Foley, the principal at Kennedy School in Somerville, Mass., sent an email to teachers warning them about celebrating Thanksgiving, the Boston Herald reported.

“When we were young we might have been able to claim ignorance of the atrocities that Christopher Columbus committed against the indigenous peoples,” Kennedy School Principal Anne Foley wrote.

“We can no longer do so. For many of us and our students celebrating this particular person is an insult and a slight to the people he annihilated. On the same lines, we need to be careful around the Thanksgiving Day time as well.”

Teachers have already been told not to let students dress up for Halloween.

Parents told MyFoxBoston that they felt the principal was overreacting.

“My kids were brought up with Halloween and whatever have you. She has no right to tell these kids they can’t have it,” one woman told the station.

“The children, they need to express themselves and be children. Don’t take holidays and fun time away from them. They have so much homework. They don’t have enough play time,” another said.

Superintendant Tony Pierantozzi told The Herald that Halloween is “problematic” because of connections to witchcraft.

“I don’t think they should not be able to celebrate these holidays I mean this country was formed with the idea that everything is a free country, and they should be able to celebrate these holidays,” a Somerville woman told MyFoxBoston.

Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone, who has three kids at Kennedy, also weighed in.

“I’m the son of Italian immigrations, so I take Columbus Day very near and dear, and I’m proud that he discovered America and that America’s named after another Italian,” Curtatone said. “If we ignore and we don’t want to talk about it, if we want to stifle debate, then we’re ignoring history.”

He also added that he was planning on being in full costume at Somerville’s annual Halloween parade, which residents said is one of the largest in the greater Boston area.

A few Kennedy students also said they disagreed with the ban.

“I don’t like that. I’ve celebrated Halloween since I was a little kid and I don’t think it’s right to ban it,” one Kennedy student told MyFoxBoston.

“I think that it’s kind of ridiculous because we should celebrate what we want to celebrate. We shouldn’t be told what we shouldn’t by other people,” another said.

The situation even caught the attention of U.S. senator for Massachusetts, Scott Brown.

“Let’s not take political correctness to the extreme. Let the kids in Somerville enjoy Halloween,” Brown tweeted Friday.

Northeastern states are facing a jack-o’-lantern shortage this Halloween after Hurricane Irene destroyed hundreds of pumpkin patches across the region, farmers say.

Wholesale prices have doubled in some places as farmers nurse their surviving pumpkin plants toward a late harvest. Some farmers are trying to buy pumpkins from other regions to cover orders.

“I think there’s going to be an extreme shortage of pumpkins this year,” said Darcy Pray, owner of Pray’s Family Farms in Keeseville, in upstate New York. “I’ve tried buying from people down in the Pennsylvania area, I’ve tried locally here and I’ve tried reaching across the border to some farmers over in the Quebec area. There’s just none around.”

Hurricane Irene raked the Northeast in late August, bringing torrents of rain that overflowed rivers and flooded fields along the East Coast and into southern Canada. Pray saw his entire crop, about 15,000 to 20,000 pumpkins, washed into Lake Champlain.

But pumpkin farmers had been having a difficult year even before the storm. Heavy rains this spring meant many farms had to postpone planting for two or three weeks, setting back the fall harvest, said Jim Murray, owner of the Applejacks Orchard in Peru, N.Y.

A late harvest can be fatal to business because pumpkin sales plummet after Halloween on Oct. 31. Wholesalers need to get pumpkins on their way to stores by mid-September.

Another spate of rain about two weeks before Irene caused outbreaks of the phytophthora fungus —a type of water mold — in many fields, said Jim Stakey, owner of Stakey’s Pumpkin Farm in Aquebogue, on New York’s Long Island.

This week a cold snap threatened to kill the surviving vines, Murray said.

“We were real close to a frost last night,” Murray said Saturday. “It was 34, and if we had had a frost, a lot of immature pumpkins would have never made it.”

The wholesale price for a bin of 32 to 45 pumpkins ranged from $150 to $200 in upstate New York, about twice the normal price, Pray said. It was still unclear how the shortage would affect retail prices, he said, but in a normal year, each pumpkin could sell for up to $15 at a supermarket in a big city like New York.

The problems for Northeast farmers have been a boon for growers in other parts of the country, especially in big pumpkin-producing states like Illinois, Indiana, California, Ohio and Michigan.

“There’s been a ton of people calling from New Jersey,” said Larry Goebel, co-owner of Goebel Farms in Evansville, Ind. “We can sell every pumpkin we want to sell.”

With good pumpkins hard to find, Murray said buyers can make them last longer by washing them with water mixed with a little bleach. That kills any fungus left over from the fields and staves off mold and rotting, he said.

The pumpkin crunch could also affect tourism because pick-your-own pumpkin farms have become important attractions in many rural areas, farmers said.

Stakey’s 26-acre farm offers pumpkin-picking along with pony rides, a cornfield maze, rides in a farm wagon and other events. He said he’s buying extra pumpkins to put in the fields to supplement his own crop.

“Just get your pumpkins early, that’s all I can say,” he said. “It’s going to be a difficult season.”