Working ‘9 to 5’ didn’t stop Halifax-based Matt Bustin from honouring Dolly Parton this Halloween, carving a Jack-o’-lantern portrait of the country star.
“It makes me happy because it makes people smile,” Bustin told CTV News about his viral pumpkin. “And you see a lot of people commenting, ‘Oh, I miss her,’ things like that… It’s just a nice little reminder of somebody’s legacy and you get to honor them.”
He posted a video to social media on Wednesday, showing the process of creating the pumpkin. By Friday morning it already had over 300,000 views.
But Bustin’s been at this craft for 11 years.
“The first pumpkin I kind of did was Millie Bobby Brown in Stranger Things when she was a kid,” he said. “She ended up liking it on Instagram.”
Then, he started wondering what other celebrities he could carve into the pumpkins.
“Every year I would do somebody popular and I don’t remember who it was, but somebody died and it might have been Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and somebody asked me to do a pumpkin of her… I carved that one, and that was very popular and kind of went from there,” Bustin said.
He chose the Queen one year and many other well-known faces.
“It was just pop culture at first, but now it’s really turned into sort of like an honoring somebody who’s passed away,” Bustin explained.
James Earl Jones and Matthew Perry are also some of his honoured pumpkins, the latter also making a splash on social media.
“I put it up online and took my kids trick or treating. And by the time I got home, it said I had something like 60,000 TikTok notifications, which was very strange,” he laughed. “I’d had a couple hundred, maybe a thousand in the past, but that was very different. And that one ended up going up to over a million, which is small in the grand scheme of viral. But it was still a fun experience, so it’s hard not to want to do that again.”
Usually he says it’s Facebook or Instagram that rake in the views.
“Often the people who pass away, who I end up doing carving of, are usually of an older generation,” he explained of his target audience. “I find that my parents’ generation really enjoy these, so maybe that’s partly because they are the ones who are largely on Facebook these days and things like that, but they share it around a lot.”
However, with the Matthew Perry pumpkin going viral on TikTok he noticed younger generations were also fitting into his target demographic.
For Bustin’s kids, they believe this is “just what dad does,” he laughed. “So yeah, this is the first year they were a bit interested in who I did carving of because they fell in love with the song ‘9 to 5’ this summer.”
But Bustin got his start at carving at a young age, watching his dad carve unique pumpkins each year.
“I guess one year he wasn’t home yet or something, and I decided to carve one,” he said. “I had some fun with it. I would have been my late teens and just started playing with it every year.”
He would experiment with textures and lighting, shading the pumpkins differently as he learned.
“It’s a strange hobby that it can only happen for a certain amount of time in the year. And I kind of like that because the pressure’s off.”
Even so, it takes up quite a bit of time,
“Dolly probably took me about seven or eight hours. So not like crazy, crazy long. But it’s tough when you work full time and you have kids and so trying to find the time to do it is a little bit harder as the years go on,” he said.
“I don’t stop doing it, every year, I question, will I do it again? And then the time rolls around and I got to do it again.”
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