H
ALLOWEEN WOULDN’T BE COMPLETE WITHOUT A GLOWING PUMPKIN ON THE FRONT PORCH, GLOWERING AT TRICK-OR-TREATERS, BUT DID YOU EVER WONDER HOW THIS RITUAL BEGAN? While the carving of gourds into ornately decorated lanterns dates
By the early 1700s, the term jack-o’-lantern – or “Jack of the Lantern” in its orig-
back thousands of years to Africa, the most widely held theory on the origin of the jack-o’-lantern is that it was derived from a popular Irish folk tale
about a miserly blacksmith known as Stingy Jack. Though the story has undergone many permutations over the years, folklore has it that Jack was stumbling back from a pub one Hallow’s Eve when he ran into the Devil himself. He agreed to make a bargain for his soul in exchange for one last drink before he went to Hades. Being a bit of a tightwad, Jack asked the Devil if he wouldn’t mind picking up the tab. The Devil agreed and transformed himself into a sixpence coin, with which Jack was to pay the bartender for his libations. Even though Jack was drunk, he still had his wits about him and quickly placed the coin in his pocket, which also contained a silver cross. The Devil, unable to change back into his fiendish form next to the religious artifact, then made a deal with Jack that if he let him out of the pocket, he would not return for his soul for another ten years. When Old Scratch came back a decade later, Jack would only agree to go with
him if he was allowed to pluck an apple from a nearby tree, to eat along the way. The Devil conceded, and just as he climbed the tree to procure the fruit, Jack whipped out his pocketknife and trapped the Devil again by carving a cross into the trunk of the tree. Outraged at being duped for a second time, the Devil agreed to never take Jack’s soul if he let him go. Jack complied, and the Devil returned to hell alone. Years later, Jack died but wasn’t allowed into heaven due to his wicked ways. Nor
was he allowed into hell because of the Devil’s promise. Instead, he was damned to wander the darkness between the two realms. To light his way, the Devil tossed him an ember from hell’s eternal fires, which Jack placed in a hollowed-out turnip, cre- ating a lantern. Since then, Jack has roamed the darkness with his lantern – a damned
soul with no home. This fear of lost souls spawned the Irish Halloween custom of dressing in costumes to frighten away spirits. The townsfolk would also leave offerings of food outside their front doors and paint or carve faces onto turnips, potatoes, beets and rutabagas, which were then placed in windows and doors in an effort to scare off Stingy Jack and any other shelter-seeking souls who came a-knockin’ on All Hal- low’s Eve.
Hollow Man: (from left to right) Jack-o’-lanterns as we know them today, an Irish jack-o’-lantern from the early 20th century, and a still from It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.
inal form – was commonly used in Ireland as a nickname for night watchmen with lanterns who patrolled the villages and farmlands in order to scare off predatory an- imals and poachers. But, it wasn’t until 1837 that the phrase “jack-o’-lantern” first appeared in American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, as an idiom for a carved vegetable lantern. In 1845, the Great Potato Famine forced hundreds of thousands of poor Irish farm-
ers to emigrate to North America. Not surprisingly, they brought over their customs and superstitions, including the jack-o’-lantern. North America’s large orange gourds were easier to hollow out and proved ideal for carving. As populations migrated to the cities, they took the art of pumpkin carving with them. Jack-o’-lanterns were slowly becoming a Halloween tradition but, strangely
enough, it took an animated television special, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, based on Charles M. Schulz’s famous comic strip Peanuts, to fully entrench them in the mind of the North American public as the symbol of the season. The special be- came an instant classic after it aired in 1966, and solidified the place of the jack-o’- lantern as an essential part of Halloween. These days, pumpkins are a profitable crop in North America. A recent History
Channel program on Halloween reported that American farmers grow approximately 680 million kilograms of pumpkins each year, while a 2004 Canadian governmental farming report stated that, in Canada alone, pumpkins have become the fastest growing crop in the country, worth more than $22 million per annual harvest. Also worth noting, 92 percent of all pumpkins are used for decoration (the rest are canned). Pumpkin carving contests are now standard, retail chain stores sell stencil kits and even famous homemaker Martha Stewart sells jack-o’-lantern templates. From silent sentinel to ward off evil, to party favour, the jack-o’-lantern remains the ghoulish face that lights up the night with a flickering glow and a wicked grin.
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