Nearly everyone loves the circus and this year’s massive festival carving will feature “The Greatest Growth on Earth”—giant pumpkins—in a collective scene of under-the-tent showmanship involving circus animals—lion, tiger, elephant.

Headline carvers: Dean Murray, making his seventh consecutive appearance at the event, will lead a team of experienced and award-winning artists including: Chris Foltz, Ryan Andersen and central PA’s own, Danny Kissel. They take on the titanic task of sculpting nearly 10 tons of pumpkin into a seamless scene—stacking, staging, cutting and arranging pumpkins—large and small—together to make the final image appear continuous. The carvers, all renowned performers in the field of “temporary art,” arrive days before the event to begin picking, scraping, etching, chiseling and fashioning raw pumpkin into fleshy 3-D imagery. Individually, the quartet has performed around the world, on television and in major festivals everywhere—and have collected multiple titles in international competitions across varying carving disciplines [food, wood, ice].