Meet the modern jack-o'-lantern: round, orange, smiling like it just heard a good joke. It is friendly. It is photogenic. It is, historically speaking, a bit of an impostor.
Made from whatever was cheap
The original Halloween lantern came from Ireland and Scotland, and it was made from root vegetables. Turnips, mangelwurzels (a big beet grown for animal feed), potatoes. Nathan Mannion, senior curator at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin, gave the most practical reason: "Metal lanterns were quite expensive, so people would hollow out root vegetables."
The recipe was simple. Scoop out the hard insides, carve a face, put a glowing ember or a small candle inside, carry it by a string. The result looked nothing like today's pumpkins. A shrivelled turnip with a crooked face, lit from inside, looks less like a smile and more like a small skull. Which was kind of the point.
Why the scary face?
These lanterns belonged to Samhain, the old Celtic festival on 1 November, with its eve on 31 October. It was the night when the border between the living and the dead was thought to be thin. A grotesque face was meant to frighten off wandering spirits, not welcome trick-or-treaters.
Then there's Jack. In the Irish folk tale, Stingy Jack is a mean, hard-drinking trickster who fools the devil twice. When he dies, heaven doesn't want him and the devil won't take him. He is left to wander the dark with only a burning coal, which he puts inside a carved turnip to light his way. Jack of the lantern. Jack-o'-lantern.
The Carnegie Museum of Natural History adds a more scientific twist. Strange lights over marshes, called ignis fatuus or 'foolish fire', are caused by gases from rotting plants. People who saw them needed a story, and wandering souls with lanterns were a good one.
The turnip you can still see
One of these vegetables survived, sort of. The National Museum of Ireland, Country Life, in County Mayo, displays a plaster cast of an old 'ghost turnip' from Baile na Finne in County Donegal, carved in the early 1900s. The original was falling apart, so the museum kept a copy. Photos of it travel around the internet every October, and people usually react the same way: nope.
To be fair, IrishCentral notes that there is no solid academic proof that the custom started only in Ireland. England had similar lanterns, like 'Hoberdy's Lantern' in Worcestershire at the end of the 18th century.
Enter the pumpkin
The big change happened in America. Irish immigrants, many arriving during and after the Great Famine of the 1840s, found a vegetable that was bigger, softer and much easier to carve than a turnip: the pumpkin. National Geographic says the earliest known picture of a pumpkin jack-o'-lantern probably appeared in Harper's Weekly in 1867, according to historian Cindy Ott.
From there, the scary turnip slowly turned into the goofy orange face we know. So tonight, when you light your pumpkin, give it a little respect. Its great-grandfather was a turnip with a very bad attitude.