We’ve Gone Out of Our Gourds for Pumpkin — It’s in Everything Now!

A little fall flavoring is nice, but when even cough drops and yogurt become seasonal, we've got issues

It’s fall, and everyone’s in love with pumpkin — a little too much, if you ask me.

Pumpkin is now added to coffee, donuts, muffins, candle scents, skin lotion, drinks, and so much more.

Every time I turn around someone is asking me to pick up a pumpkin product, bake a pumpkin product, or enjoy something that has pumpkin in it.

I went to the coffee shop in our town this week. It’s a small, privately owned business, and not a part of a big chain, so I thought I’d be safe.

“Hi,” the server said brightly as I tried to see around a stack of pumpkin-glazed donuts. “We have pumpkin-flavored coffee, pumpkin gelato, and pumpkin cream cheese if you’d like a bagel. Fall is pumpkin month!”

My coffee was delivered with two Hershey’s Kisses candies wrapped in seasonal orange foil.

“What’s this?” I said suspiciously.

“Pumpkin Kisses,” my server said, grinning. “Enjoy!”

The pumpkin mania is so intense, actual pumpkins are losing ground.

I brought in a small, perfectly shaped pumpkin the other day to my house and set it on the kitchen counter, and eventually had to point out the object to my pumpkin-crazed family. “This is where all the goodness comes from,“ I said, patting it. “This is the genesis of all those trendy products you somehow can’t get enough of.”

They just stared at me for a minute, then asked me to make pumpkin brownies.

Related: Try These Easy, Mouth-Watering Fall Recipes Today

I was at the store and my teenager called. “Hi,” he said, his mouth full of a pumpkin muffin he had just picked up at a drive-thru window. “Can you pick up some Pumpkin Spice Cheerios? They’re new. They’re a real thing.”

“That’s just wrong,” I said to him, standing in the frozen foods.

I grimaced; I was standing in front of stacks of pumpkin-spiced Chobani yogurt.

“Can you Google whether someone can actually get too much pumpkin?” I asked my son. “I’m worried. It has vitamins, but you shouldn’t have too much of even a good thing. Please check on that for me.”

The next day I was at a neighborhood Bible study and had a sudden coughing fit, and my friend handed me a pumpkin-infused caramel.

“There you go,” she whispered, smiling at me.

I was starting to feel a little freaked out.

Look, I enjoy a nice pumpkin product just like the next gal, but is it possible we have gone too far as a society? We’re kind of going out of our gourds a little bit here with all this pumpkin passion. And we’re fickle, too. Just wait until Christmas comes around; people will be all about the taste of peppermint and the smell of evergreen trees, and pumpkin will be treated like last week’s fish.

I guess the trick is to go with the flow and be happy we have such variety in our foods and in our lives. But if this trend starts heading toward other foods, if people start feeling this way about squash or rhubarb, for instance, trying to get them into everything — then we’ve got to admit we have a problem!

See some pumpkin pushback in the video below.