Pumpkin Palooza panic: How a cross-carved gourd sparked a mini culture war

What started as a cute carving contest in Tega Cay, South Carolina turned into a viral debate about religion, politics, and how easily we overreact online

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There are important stories happening in the news. This is not one of them.

But it raised a lot of red flags online so I figured it was worth looking into.

Last week, the city of Tega Cay, South Carolina announced the winners of its “Pumpkin Palooza 2025” carving competition. Locals were allowed to submit one Jack-o’-lantern for the contest, with the main rule being that the pumpkins couldn’t be “distasteful, political, or inappropriate.” Simple enough. Prizes would be given to 1st Place, 2nd Place, and “People’s Choice Award: Most likes on Facebook,” the original posting said.

But when the results came out, there were prizes for the top three entries.

In third place was this spooky eye:

Creepy! That artist won a $50 gift card to a local custard shop.

In second place was this scary, sewn-up pumpkin face:

Scary! That person received a family pack from a local miniature golf course.

And (cue drum roll) the first place winner was this… extremely basic cross:

How that one was deemed worthy of tickets to a winter festival at a local amusement park, I don’t know. But the artistry and skill level was questionable. Was this just pandering? This had to be pandering.

The real fun came when the city posted the winners online and marked them as 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place… rather than 1st, 2nd, and People’s Choice. Maybe it was an innocent mistake, but it created a huge stir online. Commenters couldn’t believe it and they said as much underneath the (now-deleted) announcement:

Another commenter noted that if the winner was purely the result of online voting, then this participant knew her audience. (In the UK, going by popular vote once led to a ship named “Boaty McBoatface.” In the U.S., we get Jesus.)

Or maybe everyone missed the point. After all, Christianity can be far scarier than carved faces. Hell, Tega Cay is where Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker used to live.

Had the city just admitted the Christian pumpkin got the most votes online, maybe this wouldn’t have provoked as much reaction. But their post made it seem like those winners were the result of some kind of judging panel.

So just to set the record straight, this is what the city posted online before Halloween, asking people to vote for their favorites:

As of this writing, both the sewn-up face (302 likes) and the creepy eyeball (422 likes) have more likes than the basic cross (191 likes), though the latter may have had the most votes at the deadline, before the city began attracting attention.

So there’s nothing nefarious happening here, as far as I can tell. All of this appears to stem from a mistake on a city-made flyer that played right into the internet’s hands. The contest wasn’t rigged. It shouldn’t surprise us that a contest involving people who vote for things on Facebook was dominated by a lazy carving of a cross on a pumpkin. This wasn’t creeping Christian Nationalism in action. It was just a mix of local government chaos, social media, and online voting. Not every pumpkin with a cross is a symbol of religious domination. Sometimes, it’s just what happens when grandma’s church group gets really active on Facebook before the deadline.

The city official in charge of the contest did not respond to a request for comment.

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