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Why We Carve Faces Into Pumpkins
The jack-o'-lantern started as a carved turnip in Ireland and Scotland, and only became a pumpkin after the tradition crossed the Atlantic. A short history, plus the odd facts worth knowing.
Carving a face into a vegetable and putting a light in it is a strange thing to do, and people have been doing it for hundreds of years. Here is where it came from.
It started with turnips
Long before pumpkins, people in Ireland and Scotland carved faces into turnips and potatoes. They called the carvings jack-o’-lanterns and believed they would ward off evil spirits and bring good luck. The turnip versions looked considerably scarier than anything we make now.
The name comes from an old phrase meaning “man with a lantern”, which is what a carved vegetable with a light in it looks like in the dark.
The pumpkin was an American substitution
When people from Ireland and Scotland moved to America in the 1800s they brought the tradition with them, and found a better vegetable waiting. Pumpkins are bigger than turnips and much softer, so they are far easier to carve. The tradition swapped crops and never swapped back.
As Halloween grew into a bigger celebration in America, the jack-o’-lantern went with it. People set them on porches and in windows, the same way their families had back in Ireland and Scotland.
Facts worth knowing
- Pumpkins are fruit. They belong to the squash family, which makes them relatives of cucumbers and melons.
- The world’s largest jack-o’-lantern was carved from a pumpkin weighing 2,350 pounds.
- The fastest pumpkin carving on record is 16.47 seconds, set by Stephen Clarke in 2013.
- In the United States, 90% of the pumpkins grown are used for jack-o’-lanterns.
- In parts of England the carvings are called punkies, and children carry them door to door singing the Punkie Night Song.
- The light inside a jack-o’-lantern is called a candle brain.
- In parts of America, a jack-o’-lantern whose light went out on Halloween night was considered a sign of bad luck.
- The first written use of the term jack-o’-lantern was in 1837.
Still going
Millions of pumpkins get carved every October 31st. When you are scraping out the inside of one, you are doing a version of something people were doing with turnips centuries before pumpkins were an option.
Pick a face in the shop, or start with the stencil method.
