The First Jack-o'-Lanterns Weren't Pumpkins

Before porch pumpkins, there was a much scarier vegetable

There is something deeply unfair about how cute modern jack-o'-lanterns have become.

Because their older relatives were horrifying.

Before pumpkins became the round orange face of Halloween in North America, people in Ireland carved lanterns from turnips. One surviving example in the National Museum of Ireland comes from County Donegal, where a teacher who donated it in 1943 said this was the kind of lantern people in the area had made around 1900. A candle went inside. The face carved into the root was meant to frighten people on Halloween night.

Honestly, look up an old carved turnip sometime.

It has seen things.

Scotland had its own version of the tradition, too, with carved turnips sometimes called tumshies. They were not neat little porch decorations. They were roots pulled from the ground, hollowed by hand, cut into faces, and lit from within.

And then there is Jack.

One popular Irish folktale tells of Stingy Jack, a man clever enough to trick the Devil but not wise enough to secure himself a pleasant afterlife. When Jack died, Heaven would not take him and Hell would not have him. In the story, he is left to wander with only a burning coal for light, which he carries inside a hollowed turnip.

Jack of the lantern.

Jack-o'-lantern.

It is a wonderful story.

It is also best understood as one story attached to the tradition, not a tidy single origin for every carved lantern. Folklore almost never behaves that cleanly. Names, customs, ghost stories, seasonal rites, and local practices tend to gather around one another over generations.

What we do know is that carved root lanterns belonged to the Halloween traditions immigrants carried across the Atlantic.

And North America had pumpkins.

Large ones.

Soft ones.

Hollow ones.

Vegetables that did not require a minor act of violence with a kitchen knife just to carve an eye hole.

The pumpkin won.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the glowing pumpkin had become deeply associated with American Halloween. The old root lantern had been translated into something native to the place where the tradition had landed.

That may be the part I love most.

Traditions survive because they are allowed to change.

They cross borders. They pick up new materials. They lose pieces and gain others. A turnip becomes a pumpkin. A frightening little lantern becomes a neighborhood ritual. Something carried from one home becomes part of another.

And under all of it is the same old instinct:

The nights are getting longer.

There may be strange things beyond the door.

So light something.

Put it in the window.

Give the dark a face.

And keep the light on.