Halloween is a time for scares and chills, but this year I’d like to share a few facts you may not have known about this spooky holiday.
Why is it a ‘Jack-’ o-lantern?
Well, ‘Jack’s Lantern’ was part of a Gaelic folktale much like the Will of the Wisp, where the lantern of the respective person named Jack or Will would use the lanterns to lead unwary travelers into the unknown and danger in folktales.
Today we use them as decorations originally thought to ward off bad spirits from your home, but the origin of ‘Jack’ related to carved pumpkins was quite the opposite, he was the bad spirit coming to get you.
The original ‘Jack-O-Lanterns’ were not carved from pumpkins at all.
While on the subject of carved objects from the garden, it is a fact that over the pond in the United Kingdom the first vegetable to be used to frighten away the horrors of the night was not a pumpkin but instead the humble turnip.
Later, Irish immigrants in America would adopt the pumpkin for that purpose due to cost, but if you think people make some disturbing looking carved pumpkins, go look at pictures of carved turnips, they are much, much scarier.
Most of the pumpkins found in the United States come from only four sources.
‘Big like Texas’ is a thing for sure, but perhaps does not apply to a generous pumpkin harvest as most of our commercially sold pumpkins in the United States come from one of four states in the union: Illinois, Michigan, California, New York, and Pennsylvania.
Oh my gourd!
If ghosts are the spirits of the dead, why do they look like bed sheets in some stories?
Well, to take a quick glance at real life paranormal research, ghosts can be anything from balls of light to full bodied apparitions wearing clothing (some you cannot even ‘see’ at all), but at the time such tales were coming into prominence, most deceased bodies were wrapped in ‘Death Shrouds,’ which as you may have guessed were essentially white sheets…presumably without eye holes cut out.
In Germany they hide all the knives on Halloween.
There are a few weird variations on the holiday world wide, such as in New England, where teenaged girls would once use cabbage stumps on Halloween as a fortune telling tool to find their future husbands, but Germany used the date to honor the dead and those who had passed in the last year.
However, they do hide all the knives and sharp objects in their houses, lest the spirits hurt themselves, which is odd, because as they are already dead, not sure what further harm can come to them.
So that is it for this year, hope you and yours are having a great fall season as we dip closer to the ‘cold’ side of the coin, but then again, that is why you enjoy the harvest before the frost sets in.
