Halloween is synonymous with costumes and dark festivities. However, no tradition tests your creativity and knife-wielding skills more than carving a jack o’lantern. If you’re looking to carve the perfect jack o’lantern either to scare your neighbors or enter our pumpkin carving contest, here are a few important tips.

Pick the right pumpkin

The first step is actually picking a healthy pumpkin from the patch. In order to pick the right shape, you can go about it two ways. You can go in with a design already planned, so you can get a pumpkin that fits your plan. For example, if you want to carve a screeching cat, you might want a taller one. Or you could simply go in without a plan and pick the most uniform pumpkin with no scratches or bruises. You also want to make sure that the skin is firm.

Select a unique design

This one is entirely up to you, but you should be fully aware of your limitations and avoid something too ambitious for your skill level. You can create your own on a piece of paper or scour the Internet for inspiration.

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A survival knife is a piece of equipment that can literally save your life if all else fails. This tool can be used for hunting, building shelter, cleaning fish and even self-defense.

And for those looking to pick up a solid, all-around survival knife, the choices are plenty. While many of the survival knives being sold today are great quality tools, not all of them are perfectly designed for survival situations. So if you’re trying to buy the best knife for surviving in dire circumstances, these are the five features you don’t want on your survival knife.

Folding mechanism

The last feature you want on a survival knife is the ability to fold. A folder, while much more convenient, is also much more likely to break when used in survival situations. You want a knife that does not have moving parts or bits that can be easily broken. Even if it does have a lock, extreme pressure will sometimes break a knife. Instead, opt for a fixed-blade knife.

Serrations

Serrated and partially serrated knives are all the rage these days. While there are plenty of good uses for serrations on certain knives, a fully serrated blade is a bad way to go. Serrations are mainly good for cutting rope, among a few other specialized activities. Everything you will be doing in the wilderness would require a plain edge. Also, serrated blades are impossible to sharpen on the fly, so if your blade dulls while you’re trying to survive, you’ll be out of luck. Instead, go for the plain-edged blade.

Gut hook

It might make sense to try to pack all the features into your survival knife like a gut hook. Wrong. You want a simple blade that will not make doing some of the important tasks, like slicing things, more difficult. You would likely rarely if never need a gut hook in survival situations.

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