Like Christmas displays in stores, the Grinch came early this year, stealing pumpkins grown by a class of Minnesota third-graders, their teacher says.

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Lori Gustafson, a teacher at Salem Hills Elementary School in the St. Paul suburb of Inver Grove Heights, said she had to break the bad news to her students last week that someone had stolen the pumpkins they had been nurturing and looking forward to harvesting.

"I felt kind of sad, maybe a little mad at whoever did it," 9-year-old Maya Merritt was quoted as saying in a St. Paul Pioneer Press story Wednesday.

"We were going to carve the pumpkins," 8-year-old Jacob Lindberg added.

One of the missing pumpkins was called "Pump," so-named because Jacob had started etching the word pumpkin on its surface only to be interrupted by rain after the first four letters.

Pump "was very special to all of us," Gustafson said.

Teachers and students at the school are now figuring out where they'll get more pumpkins for their Halloween-season class projects.