Every October, perfectly innocent pumpkins everywhere suffer the same fate.
First, we cut off their tops.
Then we scoop out their insides.
Then we carve faces into them, stick lights inside, and proudly display their glowing heads on our porches.
Which raises a perfectly reasonable question:
Why do we carve pumpkins on Halloween?
Because when you think about it, that’s a pretty weird thing to do to a vegetable.
And here’s the best part:
The original jack-o’-lanterns weren’t even pumpkins.
Before Pumpkins, There Were… Turnips?
Long before people were hauling giant orange pumpkins home from pumpkin patches, people in Ireland and other parts of the British Isles carved faces into vegetables such as turnips.
Yes. Turnips.
Imagine sitting down at the kitchen table for a nice relaxing evening of turnip carving.
The tradition goes back hundreds of years and became associated with Halloween in Ireland and Scotland. People hollowed out root vegetables, carved faces into them, and sometimes placed lights inside. The Library of Congress
And if you’ve ever tried cutting a raw turnip, you may suddenly have a new appreciation for pumpkins.
But why were people carving creepy faces into vegetables in the first place?
That’s where things get even stranger.
Meet Stingy Jack
One famous Irish folktale tells the story of a troublesome man known as Stingy Jack.
There are several versions of the story, but they have one important thing in common:
Jack was a trickster.
According to the legend, Jack managed to trick the Devil more than once. Eventually Jack died, but he wasn’t allowed into Heaven—and because of his dealings with the Devil, he couldn’t go to Hell either.
So Jack was left wandering the Earth.
The Devil supposedly gave him a burning coal to light his way, and Jack placed it inside a hollowed-out turnip.
People began calling the wandering figure Jack of the Lantern, which eventually became jack-o’-lantern. HISTORY
And suddenly your smiling pumpkin with the triangle eyes has a much more dramatic backstory.
So Where Did the Pumpkin Come From?
If people were carving turnips, how did we end up with pumpkins?
America helped with that part.
Pumpkins are native to the Americas, where squash had been cultivated for thousands of years. Smithsonian Magazine
When Irish immigrants brought their Halloween traditions to the United States, pumpkins provided a much bigger—and considerably easier-to-carve—option for making lanterns. Over time, the pumpkin became the vegetable we most closely associated with the jack-o’-lantern. HISTORY
Honestly, this may have been one of history’s greatest upgrades.
Turnip: small, hard, difficult to carve.
Pumpkin: enormous orange canvas practically begging for a ridiculous face.
Pumpkin wins.
Why Were the Faces Scary?
Today’s jack-o’-lanterns can be just about anything.
Some are scary.
Some are silly.
Some are elaborate works of art created by people with considerably more patience than the rest of us.
But historically, scary faces made sense.
One tradition held that frightening carved faces could help ward off unwanted spirits. Carved lanterns might be placed near homes or carried through the darkness. The Library of Congress
That makes a jack-o’-lantern more than an old-fashioned Halloween decoration.
It was basically a tiny vegetable security guard.
A terrifying turnip sitting outside your house saying:
NOT TODAY, GHOSTS.
Did You Know?
Here are a few jack-o’-lantern facts you can use to impress your kids—or annoy everyone at the pumpkin patch:
Pumpkins are fruits, not vegetables. Botanically, pumpkins are fruits because they develop from a flower and contain seeds.
People didn’t always carve pumpkins. Turnips, potatoes, beets, and other root vegetables have all been used to make lanterns. Smithsonian Magazine
The name is older than the pumpkin tradition. “Jack-o’-lantern” was associated with mysterious lights and folklore before the glowing pumpkin became the Halloween symbol we recognize today. HISTORY
Pumpkins originated in the Americas. Squashes were being cultivated here thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Smithsonian Magazine
So the modern jack-o’-lantern is really the result of traditions from different places coming together over time.
Halloween Is Full of Weird Traditions
That’s one of the things that makes Halloween so interesting.
We dress up in costumes.
We knock on strangers’ doors and ask them for candy.
We decorate our houses with skeletons.
And we carve faces into enormous orange fruits and put them on the porch.
Kids are absolutely justified in having some questions.
In Why Do We Celebrate Halloween?, Gus has questions too—and before he discovers the real history behind Halloween, he has a few ridiculous guesses of his own.
Because sometimes the best way to discover the real answer is to start with a very silly question.
Big Questions. Ridiculous Guesses. Real Answers.
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