some of the pumpkin carols were written by swilfolk, some of them were written by college students in california, and some are from a book of pumpkin carols by charles schultz. there should be several hard copies of the pumpkin carols in the filk box in george, and they should also be on the web and on the swil server, if people want to rewrite some of them and make fresh copies. the only major organizational requirement of pumpkin carolling is making sure we have lots of copies of the pumpkin carols (10-12 is probably about right, since there won't be more than 20 carollers, and people can share). one of the presidents should take care of this (or get the filkmaster, if there is one, to do it).
at swil meeting, people should decide on a time for carolling to start, and the presidents should remind people to bring flashlights if they have them. carolling should happen after dark, when there are fewer trick-or-treaters out, but not too late. if halloween falls on a weekend night and is thus the same night as swiloween, pumpkin carolling should start early enough that people will have time to get back for swiloween.
people should meet in parrish parlours at the specified time, and someone should be nominally in charge. it helps if the person in charge is familiar with the neighborhood. references to specific profs will probably become dated fairly quickly, but so will this entire document, so i'll include a few anyway. make sure to pester tom hunter, who lives in carriage house -- he ignored us one year, so he deserves it.17 it's good to stop by whittier place, since a lot of profs live there. ann mcnamee really likes it when we stop by. profs are the main target, and some of the carollers will know where their favourite profs live. it's okay to do a certain amount of going door-to-door also. two other traditional stops are woolman and al bloom's house. al bloom will not be home, so it's always a little disappointing, but that's okay. stop and sing at the ml shuttle on the way out or back.
one thing to keep in mind is that pumpkin carolling is not trick-or-treating. some profs will insist that the carollers take candy, and it's not good to hurt their feelings by refusing, but the traditional response is, ``no thanks, we're just trying to spread the joy of the season.'' another reminder: it's a good idea to practice songs before you try to do them at people's houses. not everyone is familiar with all of the tunes, and some of the carols have weird bridges (or major scansion issues).