Why Do We Carve Pumpkins at Halloween?

"Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire." — Gustav Mahler

One of the best things about creating the Changing Traditions series is discovering facts that I never knew myself and bringing them to life in these books.

When I started researching Samhain: A Story About Halloween, I assumed pumpkins had always been part of Halloween. After all, these orange glowing jack-o'-lanterns seem just as much a symbol of the holiday as costumes, candy, and trick-or-treating. It turns out, pumpkins weren't the original Halloween lanterns at all.

Long before pumpkins lined front porches across North America, people in parts of Ireland and Britain carved turnips, rutabagas, and other large root vegetables into lanterns.

And that discovery sent me down a fascinating rabbit hole looking at all the different casts of these lantern carvings like the one below from Ireland. 

A traditional Irish turnip Jack-o'-lantern from the early 20th century. Photographed at the Museum of Country Life, Ireland. Rannpháirtí anaithnid at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Stingy Jack (aka Jack O'Lantern)

As I looked further into these other vegetables being carved, I stumbled upon that the tradition is often connected to the legend of Stingy Jack, a popular folktale about a man who tricked the Devil and, after his death, was doomed to wander the darkness carrying a lantern made from a hollowed-out turnip and a burning coal as he wasn't allowed into Heaven or Hell.

People began carving lanterns to represent Jack and to ward away wandering spirits.

Whether every carved turnip was directly connected to Stingy Jack is difficult to know. Folklore and traditions often become intertwined over generations. What we do know is that carved turnips became associated with autumn celebrations like Samhain and now are Halloween traditions in Ireland and beyond and they are still called jack-o'-lanterns.

There's also a poem Romance of Jack o Lantern that was published in 1851, The Rhyme Book by Hercules Ellis - available to read as a PDF on Google Books which goes into detail about Jack O'Lantern and his fate of carrying the glowing turnip for all eternity.

What surprised me most was what those original lanterns actually looked like. Modern pumpkins are often cheerful, funny, or artistic. Historical carved turnips, on the other hand, can be genuinely unsettling. Their twisted shapes and rough faces look far more like something from a ghost story than the smiling pumpkins many of us carve today. 

When I came across photographs of surviving examples, and read the poem, I immediately knew I wanted to include the tradition in Samhain. As you can see, I tried to make mine a bit more friendly for the kids while still capturing that turnip feel.

Of course, that still leaves one important question:

If people traditionally carved turnips and other root vegetables, how did pumpkins become the symbol of Halloween?

Why Pumpkins Replaced Turnips for Halloween Jack-o-lanterns

The answer is surprisingly simple, during the nineteenth century, immigrants brought many of their traditions with them to North America. Once here, they discovered a vegetable that was much larger, easier to carve, and far more common than the turnips they had used back home.

The pumpkin.

The best part was a pumpkin provided more room for detailed faces, was easier to hollow out, you could roast the seeds and, due to the size produced a brighter lantern. Over time, pumpkins gradually replaced turnips as the preferred choice for Halloween lanterns as you can see by looking at of them glowing as you walk down the streets.

That idea of traditions changing over time is really at the heart of the every book in the Changing Traditions series.

Many of the customs we think of as timeless are actually the result of centuries of adaptation. Traditions travel with people, they move with them across countries and oceans and they change as new materials, ideas, and circumstances shape them.

In this case, a carved turnip becomes a carved pumpkin but carving and lighting jack-o-lanterns remain a core part of the celebration. An old folktale becomes a modern holiday symbol that I think we can all agree represents Halloween with just one glance.

Researching these connections is one of my favourite parts of creating these books. Every project starts with a familiar tradition and a simple question: "How did we get here?" So far, the answers are much more surprising than I expected.

And, in the case of Halloween, it turns out the story begins not with a pumpkin, but with a turnip.

Samhain: A Story About Halloween is part of the Changing Traditions series, which explores the history, folklore, and evolving customs behind holidays and celebrations, helping young readers discover how traditions change over time. Coming soon to a bookstore or library near you.

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