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Momi Nonmi
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Akami Omakase
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Matsunori Handroll Bar
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Judy’s Bay
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Guides
Best pumpkin patches in the Boston area
A pumpkin trip can be a quick stop for something to carve or an afternoon involving a wagon ride, apple picking and several doughnuts. Before choosing among pumpkin patches in the Boston area, decide which version you want. The activities, admission arrangements and distance from the city vary considerably. These four farms are in Harvard, Tyngsboro, North Andover and Northborough. They are day trips out of Boston, and their pumpkin offerings are seasonal. Check the farm’s daily update before leaving, particularly after rain. A farm store can be open while its fields or wagon rides are closed. Westward Orchards takes visitors to its pumpkin patch by wagon on fall weekends. Its 2026 schedule runs from September 19 through October 18, with rides from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Rain stops the wagon, so this is one to check again on the morning of your visit. The farm also sells pumpkins, gourds and seasonal decorations around the store, which gives you an alternative if you only want to shop. Add apple picking while the orchard is open, or buy apples, cider doughnuts and produce inside. Pumpkin-patch rides and the store have different hours; an open shop does not mean the wagon is still running. Parlee grows its pumpkins on the farm, then moves them into a display patch for visitors to choose from. You are selecting a harvested pumpkin rather than cutting one from a vine. That distinction is useful if the field-picking experience is the whole reason for your trip. There is enough else here to fill an afternoon: apple picking in season, cider doughnuts, warm apple crisp and Annie’s Animal Barns. The farm’s daily news page lists what is open, picking deadlines and food service. Its regular fall schedule closes the farm on Mondays. Activity hours can end before the farmstand closes, so do the patch first if you arrive later in the day. Smolak’s fall weekends combine choosing a pumpkin with activities such as hayrides, animal feeding and the Cow Train. This is the option for a family that wants more than one stop after parking. The farmstand and bakery give you somewhere to pick up food before heading home. Read the fall festival details for your date before paying. Activities can be bought separately or in packages, and the packages do not automatically include everything on the farm. Compare the listed contents with what your children will actually do. Apple picking, flowers and food have their own arrangements. Tougas stocks its patch with carving pumpkins, decorative varieties, smaller pumpkins and gourds. Ask staff which are suitable for cooking if you want one for the kitchen as well as the front steps. The farm sells pumpkins by weight with a minimum charge, so a bigger pumpkin also means a bigger bill. Use the picking and pricing page to compare pumpkin-patch hours with the orchard and farm kitchen. They are not interchangeable. Apple picking has a separate purchase and admission arrangement, while the barnyard, playground and cider doughnuts give families other reasons to stay. Check conditions before setting off; fields can close when supplies or weather change. Choosing between pumpkin patches in the Boston area For a wagon ride to the patch, look at Westward’s weekend schedule. For pumpkins plus animals and food, compare Parlee and Tougas. Smolak is the choice here for a day built around several children’s activities, with the costs checked individually before you buy a package. Wear shoes that can handle soil and damp grass. Leave pets at home unless the farm explicitly permits them; Westward, Parlee and Tougas publish restrictions. If a member of your group needs a step-free route, ask specifically about the patch, wagon boarding and toilets. Farm-store access does not tell you whether the field will work. For a closer-to-home afternoon on another day, our free and cheap Boston outings include parks and indoor options. Save the farm trip for a day when you have time to stay.
5 funny horror movies to watch on Halloween for people who just can’t handle it
Halloween movies are way more fun when you don’t need a Xanax. With these five you get ghosts and vampires and a hungry plant, and enough comedy to help you through the scary parts. Blood levels vary. A horror comedy can still wreck you if the joke gives up halfway through. The funny Halloween horror movies that leave you able to sleep are the ones that stay comedies. Young Frankenstein is rated PG, and the scare is mild. What We Do in the Shadows is rated R, and the blood is intentional. Gene Wilder plays a scientist who introduces himself as Fronkensteen, which is how hard he is trying to quit the family, and then finds his grandfather’s notes and runs the experiment anyway. Mel Brooks made Young Frankenstein in black and white so it would look like the old monster movies, then filled the castle with people who cannot keep a straight face. Marty Feldman is the assistant. Peter Boyle is the monster. Madeline Kahn, Teri Garr, and Cloris Leachman are in the house too. The film opened in December 1974 and it is rated PG. The British Board of Film Classification calls the horror mild and the sex references moderate. One of the jokes is the monster in bed. You do not need the earlier Frankenstein films. You need to be all right with a dirty joke in a laboratory. The Ghostbusters to put on is the 1984 one. Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson lose their university funding and open a ghost-removal business in a New York firehouse. Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis live in the same Central Park West building, which is how the mess reaches the city. There is a sequel, a reboot, and later movies about a new generation. The one with the ghost in the red circle is this one. It is rated PG, and the first ghost is a jolt. In the New York Public Library, an elderly librarian turns on them and they run. Murray never looks as frightened as the plot is asking him to be. The possession scenes get strange. The movie keeps handing the job to people who brought the equipment. Get the 1988 Beetlejuice, not the sequel. Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin die, fail at haunting their own house, and hire Michael Keaton, which goes badly. Winona Ryder is the teenager who can see them. Catherine O’Hara is busy making the house worse. The dinner where the new owners lose control of their own bodies is the reason to watch it with other people. It is rated PG. The images are not mild. A face comes off. A woman carries her own head. A teenager writes a suicide note, and there is a hanging gag. The afterlife is a dreary waiting room. If those pictures are the ones you were trying to avoid, skip to the plant. Little Shop of Horrors is a musical, so the horror arrives with songs, and the monster is a plant. Rick Moranis plays Seymour, a flower-shop clerk whose miserable little specimen starts drawing a crowd once he feeds it blood. Ellen Greene is Audrey. Steve Martin is the dentist, and the song explains the career choice: he likes the work because it hurts. Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops sings the plant. It is rated PG-13. People get eaten. Frank Oz reshot the ending after test audiences hated a finish in which the plant ate the cast, so the version that played in theaters is the less mean one. A cut where the plant wins is the ending they threw out. The plant is an enormous puppet, which helps if what you cannot stand is violence that looks real. Mute the dentist if the dentist is the actual problem. What We Do in the Shadows, the movie from 2014, is not the FX series. Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement play vampire housemates in Wellington who have had centuries to learn the dishes and still have not. A bouncer will not let them into a club. The television show started on FX in 2019, with a different cast, on Staten Island. Same kind of joke. Many more nights of it. This is the bloody one. The British board classified the film 15 for strong language and bloody violence: bites, large blood spurts, and some gory injuries, played for comedy. In the United States it is rated R. If a dark house is what keeps you up, this is easier than a straight horror movie. If blood is what keeps you up, Young Frankenstein is still at the top of the list, and the vampires can do their own washing-up.
Get to know Boston
How the Irish saved Halloween in Boston
Samhain (pronounced SAH-win or SOW-in) is an ancient Gaelic festival that marks the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter Halloween customs turned up in other American colonies. Massachusetts sat them out. Anglican and Lutheran churches kept All Saints' Day. Maryland's Catholics did too. In the South, Scotch-Irish settlers, Scots who had lived in northern Ireland, sometimes went out in costume and called it guising. The Puritans who settled here took a dim view of all of it. The Commonwealth Museum's history of the holiday traces the night to Samhain, the Celtic new year on November 1, when the dead of the past year were thought to come back for a verdict. Disguises, and a candle in a hollowed turnip, were supposed to keep the spirits away. In the eighth century, the museum says, Pope Gregory III set All Saints' Day on November 1. The eve became All Hallows Eve. Halloween is that name, worn down. The church would rather you dressed as a saint. What people actually did on October 31 still changed from one place to the next. Artist's depiction of Pope Night in Boston, 1768 Pope Night was a different riot Boston already knew how to wreck an evening in early November. The occasion was Pope Night, November 5. Old North Church traces it to Guy Fawkes Day, the anniversary of the 1605 plot to blow up Parliament. The North End and the South End each built an effigy, the pope and often the devil, and hauled it through the streets. The crowds met and fought for the figures. North End winners burned them on Copp's Hill. South End winners burned them on the Common. Isaiah Thomas, who was in the fights, wrote that broken heads were not infrequent. In 1764 a boy was run over by a cart and killed. Houses along the way were expected to hand over money. Skip the payment and the windows could go. That is still not Halloween. The Commonwealth Museum says the connection to later Halloween pranks is not clear, and that Guy Fawkes Day is a stretch as an origin. Pope Night was an anti-Catholic riot with its own date. In 1775 George Washington ordered the army to stop burning the pope in effigy. The colonies wanted Catholic allies in Canada. Old North treats that order as the end of the holiday in Boston. Traditional Irish halloween Jack-o'-lantern made out of a turnip. Photo by rannṗáirtí anaiṫnid County Cork, then a pumpkin The customs Bostonians now recognize arrived with Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century, after the Great Famine began in 1845. In County Cork, the museum says, people wore costumes on Halloween and announced themselves at a house with cow's horns. Food or a drink from the household was supposed to bring prosperity. The lantern was a turnip with a candle in it. Once those immigrants were here, a pumpkin did the job better. There is more face on a pumpkin than on a turnip, and less of a fight. They did not invent trick-or-treating. One older thread, also in the museum's account, is the medieval soul cake: bread for the poor, prayers for the dead in exchange. The pillowcase version came later. Costumes, a stop at the door, and a lantern were the Irish Halloween traditions that Boston actually got. The Globe caught on in 1884 On October 31, 1884, the Boston Daily Globe ran "Why Thousands Will Think of Erin Tonight." The Commonwealth Museum cites the headline. Halloween historian Lesley Bannatyne quotes the article. It describes Ireland, not a candy route through Boston: a church fast that fell apart when the party started, colcannon sent from the country, and "parties of young men and their sweethearts" going house to house among relatives and friends. The candy holiday was still ahead of that. Newspapers, magazines, and clubs from the Scouts to the Rotary spread Halloween in the twentieth century, the museum says. Trick-or-treaters were being spotted in Wellesley by the 1920s. After the Second World War, the baby boom made it a product. Manufactured costumes and decorations arrived then.
Boston’s streets make absolutely no sense
Take a wrong turn in downtown Boston and the city seems to rearrange itself behind you. A street bends without warning, changes its name, feeds into something called a square, and sends you back toward the place you just left. The usual explanation is that Boston paved over cow paths. It is repeated so often that it sounds like established history. The better explanation involves a small peninsula, private property, enormous amounts of fill and several towns that became Boston after laying out streets of their own. Boston’s streets started on a much smaller piece of land When English colonists established Boston in 1630, the Shawmut Peninsula was connected to the mainland by a narrow strip called Boston Neck. The route across it roughly followed present-day Washington Street toward Roxbury. There wasn't much room to leave town. The National Park Service describes the original peninsula as a place of three prominent hills, wetlands and estuaries. This was Massachusett land long before English settlement. Much of the ground that now seems inseparable from downtown Boston was still water. Early streets connected the places colonists needed to reach: houses, meetinghouses, markets, docks and fresh water. Routes fitted around slopes, shorelines and property. What served a small port town did not anticipate delivery trucks or someone trying to make a left turn on the way to a parking garage. The cows had other things to do Cows and sheep really did graze on Boston Common. The city eventually banned grazing there in 1830. That history explains why livestock belongs in the story, but it doesn't establish that wandering cattle determined the street plan. Ralph Waldo Emerson helped the idea stick. As Boston.com recounts in its examination of the cow-path story, he wrote, “we say the cows laid out Boston.” The article's historians point instead to fresh water, property boundaries and the original terrain as practical reasons for the early routes. A path used by animals might also have been used by people. That possibility is a long way from explaining an entire city. The cow story survives because it is easier to remember than the history of somebody else's property line. Boston made more land and gave it different streets Boston spent centuries creating room to grow. Hills were cut down, tidal areas were filled and the shoreline moved outward. The Leventhal Map & Education Center's account of landmaking describes both the physical work and the financial incentive: new ground could become valuable property. The result is particularly easy to see in Back Bay. Its rectangular blocks look different from the older streets downtown because they came from a different process. Planners could set out a street system for land being created, rather than fit roads around an existing waterfront town. Arthur Gilman produced his Back Bay plan in 1856. Filling began the following year and continued for almost four decades, according to the Friends of the Public Garden's history of Commonwealth Avenue Mall. The broad central mall gave the new neighborhood a long, planted space between its roadways. Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, Fairfield, Gloucester and Hereford streets even proceed alphabetically. Commonwealth Avenue, Newbury Street and Boylston Street run alongside one another. For a few blocks, Boston gives you a system you can remember. Boston also bought into other towns' street maps Today's city includes communities that developed separately. The city's annexation timeline records Roxbury joining in 1868 and Dorchester in 1870. Charlestown, Brighton and West Roxbury followed in 1874. Hyde Park joined in 1912. Those places already had roads, town centers and property boundaries. Becoming part of Boston did not erase them or require their streets to meet a Back Bay grid. A trip across the city can take you through several different systems without a sign announcing the change. Later traffic rules added another complication. One-way streets and turn restrictions can make a short route on foot a much longer trip behind the wheel. Knowing where a place is and knowing how to drive there are separate accomplishments. To see the difference without dealing with either problem, start on foot in Back Bay. Follow its rectangular blocks, then cross toward Beacon Hill's older, narrower streets. The change in the map is right under your shoes.