Sweets, handed out of a coffin. Find the Blue Pine Coffins booth at Community Park on Saturday, October 31, any time between 11am and 3pm. The coffin is real. The candy is free.
It is the best sight gag at the festival, and then you talk to them for two minutes and it stops being a gag.
What Blue Pine Coffins actually do
They are a family business in Davis making coffins for green burial and for Jewish burial. It started when the owner's mother went into hospice and he began working out how to build an all-wood coffin with no metal in it, which is what Jewish burial requires. He is a retired contractor, so working it out meant building it.
The wood is the part worth knowing. It comes from standing dead pine in the Sierra Nevada, trees already killed by drought and bark beetle, which PG&E clears away from power lines to stop them starting fires. No living tree is cut for these. The wood would otherwise be waste, or fuel.
The coffins go together with wooden pegs. No metal, no synthetic fabric, no padding, just wood shavings inside and a cotton sheet if the family wants one. All of it biodegrades. That is the whole point of green burial: you go back into the ground and nothing you take with you stays there.
Why they are at a Halloween festival
Because death is the one thing everybody is squeamish about and Halloween is the one day a year nobody is. A coffin full of sweets in a park full of costumed children is a genuinely good way to start a conversation most families never have.
Go and say hello. They are a local business, they have been a major sponsor of this festival, and they will happily explain any of the above.
bluepinecoffins.com · 216 F Street, Davis
