Happy Halloween: The story behind Google's 1,000-pound pumpkins

Happy Halloween, says Google in its pumpkin-carving video. Here's the story behind the YouTube doodle and those massive Halloween jack-o'-lanterns.

Happy Halloween, everyone. What better way to celebrate this spooky occasion than with some massive pumpkins? The Google doodle team picked out six enormous gourds for its special video tribute. Just how big are those pumpkins? Some were more than half a ton!

"To celebrate Halloween this year, the doodle team wanted to capture that fascinating transformation that takes place when carving a pumpkin," writes Sophia Foster-Dimino, a Google doodler. "Instead of picking up a few pumpkins from the grocery store, however, we decided to work on six giant pumpkins, specially delivered from nearby Half Moon Bay (some weighing well over 1,000 pounds)."

Google's largest tipped the scales at 1,298 pounds. Even after scooping out the seeds, the team estimates that the walls of the "L" pumpkin were six inches thick.

The team carved them smack-dab in the middle of Google's campus in Mountain View, Calif. The process took eight hours.

Check out the behind-the-scenes video below.

Ms. Foster-Dimino's blog post also reflected on the curious connotations of Halloween.

"When I was a little kid, Halloween seemed like the most grown-up holiday of all," she writes. "For one thrilling night of the year, I got to stay up late trick-or-treating, watch scary movies with my friends, and wield sharp and pointy objects (safety first, of course!) while carving a macabre face into a pumpkin. Now that I'm older, my perspective on Halloween has shifted a bit. It’s now the holiday that most celebrates a childlike sense of wonder and amazement."

While Google has celebrated Halloween with a doodle several years in a row now, this is one of the few video doodles. The search engine used video to great effect in its John Lennon tribute. It also poked a little fun with a video honoring Charlie Chaplin. 

The Blue Inc