'Wild, Ugly Faces We Carved in Its Skin'

“Scary or funny?” That’s how every pumpkin-carving session began. “Scary” was inevitably the answer, though we usually ended up laughing at whatever face I carved. It was an annual ritual, like trimming the Christmas tree, and took place on the newspaper-covered dining room table. Before we could trust the boys with knives, I did the honors, starting with cutting a circle around the stem and pulling out the slime-covered seeds by hand. These we washed, salted and baked in the oven, and a week later, after no one had eaten them, threw them out for the squirrels. At the time it never occurred to me that I might miss carving pumpkins, but with the boys away at school we no longer bother. I remember their excitement, a lost but remembered relict of childhood.

 

Before there were carved pumpkins and candles, there were Jack-o’- lanterns: “a will-o’-the-wisp, an ignis fatuus [foolish fire],” according to the OED. That usage dates from England in the mid-seventeenth century. A century later we have “something that lures a person into a dangerous, difficult, or unfamiliar situation or circumstance.” In 1837, Hawthorne in Twice-told Tales is credited with the first contemporary usage. The OED drains all the fun out of Jack-o’-lanterns:

 

“Originally North American. Esp. at Halloween: a lantern made by hollowing out a pumpkin (or occasionally swede, etc.) and cutting a design into the rind, often one representing the facial features.”

 

A swede, by the way, is a rutabaga, which reminds me of my first newspaper job, as editor of a weekly in rural Ohio. One morning a man walked into the office with an oversized rutabaga he thought resembled Richard Nixon in profile. I took his picture and his vegetable’s, and we published it. Simpler times. The Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a poem I remember reading in grade school, “The Pumpkin” (1850):

 

“Oh, fruit loved of boyhood! the old days recalling,

When wood-grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling!

When wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin,

Glaring out through the dark with a candle within!”