The Truth Behind the Tradition
One of the most memorable things from the Halloween movies, especially the first two, are those wicked, rippin’ looking jack o’ lanterns in the opening credits. From Trick ’r Treat to All Hallows’ Eve, pumpkin carving is everywhere. It’s one of America’s biggest traditions and one that belongs strictly to Halloween. But, why do we carve pumpkins on Halloween.
I mean, we don’t carve faces any other time of year. At least not on a mass scale. Some might say, “Well, Antheny, Halloween’s creepy and it celebrates scary stuff, so that’s why we carve faces!” Sure, fine. But then why don’t we have a Thanksgiving tradition of carving thankful faces or little pilgrim smiles into pumpkins? It’s another purely American holiday, and it features the pumpkin heavily, just in a more delicious way. But nope. Halloween gets the monopoly on the pumpkin face.
That’s where people start throwing around stories about Samhain (pronounced sow-in) and the Lord of the Dead and how the veil is thinnest. Or worse, they bring up that old tale of Smiling Jack.
Here’s the short version: Smiling Jack supposedly outsmarted the Devil in life but was greedy and cruel. When he died, the Devil wouldn’t take him (since he’d been tricked), and Heaven wouldn’t either, so he was doomed to wander the earth with a burning coal inside a hollowed out gourd to light his way. People say that’s why we light jack o’ lanterns ’till this day… to keep him and other spirits away.
But that story? Total folklore remix. Maybe the “keeping spirits away” part checks out, but the Smiling Jack part makes zero sense. Why would Jack carve a face into the gourd? And why would carving another face somehow keep him away? It gets sillier every time you think about it.
Here’s the truth, it didn’t start with pumpkins, and it definitely didn’t start with some guy named Jack.
Before America ever got involved, people in Ireland and Scotland carved turnips and beets during Samhain. They made grotesque little faces to represent spirits and used them as lanterns to ward off evil. The name “jack o’ lantern” actually came from the term used for mysterious ghost lights seen over bogs and swamps, Jack of the Lantern, or what we now call a will o’ the wisp.
When Irish immigrants came to America, they found pumpkins, bigger, softer, and way easier to carve than turnips. The two ideas merged: the spooky carved lanterns from the Old World and the massive orange fruit from the New. Over time, the pumpkin face became the face of Halloween itself.
In the end, carving a jack o’ lantern is one of the few times a year we literally make our fears visible. We carve the faces of ghosts, demons, and monsters, light them up, and stick them on our porches like trophies. Maybe that’s why those opening pumpkins in Halloween hit so hard. They’re not just decorations, they’re centuries of superstition burning behind a grin.