Pumpkin Faces and Spooky Places

Answer 1

Pumpkin carving has become a seasonal art form, with everything from the familiar grinning Jack-O'-Lanterns to portraits of presidents, celebrities, landscapes and virtually anything imaginable. Whether it's real pumpkins that wilt and grow stinky within a week or so, or fake ones that can be carved and still last for years, Halloween would hardly be the same without glowing, grinning pumpkin lanterns lining sidewalks and guarding neighborhood porches. How did these candle-lit vegetables find a place in Halloween celebrations?

In parts of Appalachia, "Jack O' Lantern" referred to a ball of light, sometimes seen around old graveyards and lonely, wooded places that had a reputation for being haunted. The "Jack-O'-Lantern" was believed to chase foolhardy people who ventured too near to places like cemeteries where they probably shouldn't be wandering around after dark in the first place. It would seem reasonable then, that the glowing, eerie faces of the carved pumpkins and gourds would come to be called "Jack-O'-Lanterns."

But much as the pumpkin is the item of choice for carving and lighting today, in ancient times there were no pumpkins to carve in the Northern Celtic regions of Europe, so it was the turnip that was carefully hollowed out with the image of a face carved into the front. A wire was then attached for a handle and the little hollowed out gourds glowed in the dark, bobbing along as children carried them through the countryside and from door to door begging for handouts. One might imagine that, in the dark, they must have looked like a parade of disembodied heads, marching along in the night, which, undoubtedly, became the source of a legion of spooky speculations. Even after the pumpkin had become the vegetable of choice in America for carving into Halloween lanterns, as late as the 1920s there could still be found greeting cards and children's Halloween toys in the image of turnips and other vegetables

No one would think about carrying a pumpkin lantern through the streets to go Trick-or-Treating, but carving them into creative, front-porch guardians or window-sill works of art is an indispensable part of Halloween dcor.