If you’ve ever wondered how you can use your Halloween yard decoration pumpkins after the spooky day has passed then you might try some fun sport ideas that have already been tried. Not only does using one of the existing sports, or making up one of your own, give some extra life to your pumpkin (albeit short lived), but they can be entertaining as well as great opportunities for some outdoor, cold weather, social participation and to burn off some of those extra holiday calories.

“Pumpkin Chunkin” for Charity

Every year, Bridgeville, Delaware (just outside of Washington D.C) hosts its World Championship Pumpkin Chunkin Association games. The charitable event was created to raise money for educational scholarships and to benefit youth programs in the local community. The sport is so popular that the Discovery Channel ran a feature on it.

Becoming a Pumpkin Chunkin Champion requires innovative engineering skills to create a device that can propel a pumkin the farthest distance. The Delaware event lasts for 3 days and is contains numerous age classes as well as 3 methods of competitive pumpkin launching which you can choose to hurl your gourd.

Not much physical exercise needed for this game, but it does give the gray matter a good workout and promotes ingenuity, creative passion and teamwork. If you want more physical exertion, try bending the rules to make the competition about hurling a pumpkin the farthest using brute strength by using a shot put or granny throw method for example.

Olympic Pumpkin Bowling

On New Year’s Day in St. Paul Minnesota, fans gather for their fun annual pumpkin bowling competition. The thought of the idea might bring a sarcastic smirk to your face (much like is found on jeering jack-o-lanterns), but the St. Paul game is taken so seriously that fans formed the International Pumpkin Federation in 2003 and even submitted documents to the Olympic Commission for consideration of the sport’s inclusion in the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia.

Prepare for pumpkin bowling by using a flat concrete or asphalt path (you northern folks may need to shovel snow to hit pay dirt). The distance from the release line to the first “pin” is 36 feet. Pins are 2-liter soda bottles filled with water and then frozen (be sure to leave enough space at the tops for expansion). You can add food coloring to the water before freezing to make your pins more festive. Set up the pins in a conventional triangle pattern with 30 inches separating the bottles on all sides.

Just as in conventional bowling, you keep score and play 10 frames. You can add more fun and get more player participation if you offer place prizes to the winners of the tournament. You can also shorten the length of the alley if you want to make the game go faster (such as in sub-zero weather!).

“Ye Olde” Drop and Splat

This amusing pumpkin tradition was actually started by the Harvard College Engineering Society and is sponsored by the Society of Physics Students. The event begins by students testing the gravity of the Earth (you know, to make sure we’re not about to float out into space any time soon) by dropping eggs from the top of a tall building (the four-story Jefferson Hall is used today).

Of course, as it goes with college students, eggs soon lost their luster and deep-frozen pumpkins have been added to the festivities. Prizes are awarded for the pumpkins that make the biggest and most impressive SPLATS!

Not a lot of exercise with this one, but it’s still a great deal of fun and one that kids are bound to enjoy. You can increase the fitness benefits of this game by having all the frozen pumpkins placed at street level and the contestants have to climb the stairs to the top of the structure you’re using for the event. Be sure to also take lots of photos and video of the splats which you can add to internet social and video sites to share with all.

Besides trying some of these existing pumpkin games, get creative and come up with some of your own. For instance, you can get together with family, friends and colleagues and strike up a game of jack-o-lantern soccer. Although you’ll have to be more ginger with your kicks, moving and passing the “ball” around makes for great exercise. Just be sure to have plenty of hollow replacement pumpkins on hand!