Why do we carve pumpkins on Halloween?

07/10/11

Your little ones are getting to that age where they want to know the answers to everything. Not just the big questions, the small ones too. Every question they ask is important, so we thought we’d create a resource for all the answers – the MC-Clopedia. Each fortnight, we’ll include a new entry from the book, which will give you the tools you need to make sure the kids are all clued up.

MC-Clopedia will be published in print sometime next year, so watch out for it on the shelves!

Why do we carve pumpkins on Halloween?

Is there anything more fun than tucking in to a huge mountain of chocolate while being dressed as your favourite spooky monster? Halloween has to be one of the best times of year for any boy or girl – but as every child knows, its always important to share. So, is that why we carve faces onto pumpkins at halloween? So that they can enjoy some chocolate too?

But what does this have to do with carving faces on pumpkins?

Actually the story of why we carve pumpkins on Halloween goes back a long, long way, to an ancient Irish myth about a peculiar fellow nicknamed “Stingy Jack”. One chilly night, in a dark and dingy old pub, Stingy Jack tricked the devil into buying his beer and made him promise to never steal his soul. Now, if there is one thing that is certainly true, it is that its never clever to make a deal with the Devil. When Stingy Jack eventually died, the devil decided to doom him to walk the night as a ghoulish ghost, with only a glowing coal inside a turnip to light his way, scaring everyone who he met. The ghost of Stingy Jack was given a new nickname: “Jack O’Lantern”. Folks started carving faces into turnips on Halloween in order to scare away Jack O’Lantern and other spine- tingling spirits. When Irish immigrants made their way to the USA in the 18th and 19th century, they brought this old tale with them. They found that pumpkins – native to north America and growing in great abundance at the time – made perfect lanterns to scare away horrible old Jack O’Lantern.