Trick-or-Turnip!
Posted in Around the Garden on October 25 2012, by Matt Newman
Elbow deep in a mound of pumpkin guts, wrenching out the last of that stringy pulp you’ll spend the next day fishing out of your hair? Probably not the best time to ponder the history of the jack o’ lantern. But once your squashy horror is grinning from your porch, peering out the kitchen window, or waiting for some hooligan or other to smash it on the driveway, take a moment and think: who actually came up with this bizarre Halloween tradition? While the NYBG is rolling out its own orange horrors courtesy of Ray Villafane, carving out this story means hopping a boat across the Atlantic to greener pastures, a place older and somewhat more partial to ghost stories (and dark, delicious stouts) than the United States.
If you guessed Ireland, you’ve got the pumpkin pegged. Or should I say turnip? As historical records tell it (there are still plenty of arguments on who inspired what), the holiday tradition of carving up starchy vegetables dates back generations in Ireland. But there was no train of cargo ships itching to haul the North American pumpkin to the shores of the Emerald Isle, as I’m sure you can gather. Instead, the Irish hollowed out their local root vegetables, adorned them with frightful faces, and lit them with embers or candles, a fall tradition brought out during Samhain–or “Sawin,” a fanciful celebration to mark the end of the fall harvest and the beginning of winter in the British Isles.