This Halloween season, plenty of families are
sitting down together, watching It’s the
Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and laying out the newspaper getting ready to
carve up their holiday jack-o’-lanterns.
As a child, my mother wasn’t too fond of the mess of pumpkin guts so all
my brother and I ever got to do was use magic markers to decorate our
pumpkins. Our pumpkins lasted a lot
longer than the carved ones, but I never felt like they were as pretty. And probably because they only color magic
marker we had was black.
As my husband and I prepped our first New York
pumpkin for surgery it got me wondering why we feel the urge to massacre a perfectly
good piece of produce. Basically, we rip
it open, tear out it’s guts and carve it up…and just for decorative purposes?
I had to sit down and look into it.
Turns out the jack-o’-lantern is part of an old Irish myth.
Here’s the story: “Stingy Jack” had a drink with the Devil and
didn’t feel like paying the tab. This
scam man got the Devil to turn into a coin which he said he would use to settle
the bill with. Well, he didn’t. Rather pocketing the change in his wallet,
next to a silver cross that kept the Devil from changing back into his fiery,
horned self. The Devil struck a deal
with Jack and said that if he let him change from the coin, he wouldn’t take
Jack’s soul. All was good until “Stingy Jack”
died and was forced to wonder the Earth forever with only a carved out turnip
lantern to light his way.
These veggie lanterns have been used for
centuries by folks as ways to frighten away wandering spirits. When immigrants came to the United States, they
brought the traditions with them and the pumpkin became incorporated into the
available produce during harvest time.
We may not be worried about keeping ghosts or spirits away today with
our jack-o’-lanterns, but my husband loves baking the pumpkin seeds! He wasted no time cutting, carving and
creating our pumpkin art.
As an adult, I realize you have to go through
some pumpkin guts to get the glory, but in the end, it’s probably worth
it. After all, what if “Stingy Jack”
turns up on our doorstep? Actually, he’d probably be scared to death considering the front porch looks like Halloween threw up on it.
