The Origin of Jack-o’-Lantern: From Turnip to Pumpkin

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Every October, Americans head to the pumpkin patch, pick out a nice round pumpkin, carve a toothy grin into it, and stick a candle inside. It’s a national Halloween ritual. This year, my pumpkin came from the Costco pumpkin patch.

A close-up view of a sculpted head resembling a mask, with rough textures, a subtly painted face, and exaggerated facial features, including deep-set eyes and a prominent mouth.
Irish ghost turnip

Here’s a little Halloween trivia that might make you look twice at the produce aisle: The original Jack-o’-lanterns were turnips.

That’s right. Before pumpkins became Halloween celebrities, turnips did the heavy lifting.

The tradition goes back to Ireland and Scotland, where people carved frightening faces into turnips, potatoes, and other root vegetables. They hollowed them out, placed a candle or burning ember inside, and set them near doorways or windows.

The lanterns provided light, but their frightening faces also protected against wandering spirits. According to Celtic tradition, the night of October 31 marked Samhain, a time when the boundary between the living and the dead supposedly grew thin.

Who was Jack?

According to Irish folklore, Jack was a rather unpleasant fellow who tricked the Devil not once, but twice.

In one version of the story, Jack persuaded the Devil to turn himself into a coin so Jack could pay for a drink. Instead of spending the coin, Jack slipped it into his pocket beside a silver cross, trapping the Devil.

Jack eventually released him after extracting a promise that the Devil wouldn’t claim his soul.

Unfortunately, Jack’s cleverness didn’t earn him any points after death. Heaven wouldn’t take him. So Jack found himself wandering in darkness, carrying a lump of burning coal the Devil had tossed him.

Jack placed the coal inside a hollowed-out turnip to light his way.

The legend of Jack of the Lantern was born. Over time, the name became Jack-o’-lantern.

The National Museum of Ireland displays a plaster cast of a carved turnip lantern donated in 1943. The original came from County Donegal and represented a local Halloween tradition around 1900.

Enter the pumpkin.

When Irish immigrants arrived in America during the 19th century, they brought their Halloween traditions with them. They soon discovered an abundance of pumpkins.

A cartoon depicting a man presenting various creatively designed jack-o'-lantern alternatives to a panel of three men at a conference table, with one man expressing disappointment over abandoning traditional pumpkins.

Pumpkins were plentiful, much larger and easier to carve than turnips. Imagine trying to scoop out a turnip with a kitchen spoon.

The pumpkin replaced the turnip as America’s Halloween decoration of choice.

Today, we spend millions of dollars on pumpkins, carving kits, decorations, and pumpkin-flavored everything. The humble turnip lost its place in Halloween history.

The next time you carve a pumpkin, remember its less glamorous predecessor.

The Jack-o’-lantern didn’t begin as a cheerful orange pumpkin sitting on a suburban porch. It began as a sinister-looking root vegetable intended to frighten away the spirits of the dead.

The turnip deserves a little recognition.

I’ll stick with my pumpkin.

Navigating Holidays Post-Halloween: Thanksgiving & Black Friday

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Halloween is over.

The candy has disappeared from the grocery-store shelves. The Halloween pop-up stores have packed themselves into cardboard boxes and vanished for another year. America has moved on to the next commercial opportunity.

I’ve never been much of a Halloween celebrant. Maybe I’m just not comfortable messing with the spiritual unknown. You never know what you might accidentally invite into the neighborhood.

When I do dress up, I have a reliable fallback: Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn, the fastball-chucking relief pitcher from the baseball movie Major League, starring Charlie Sheen. The costume requires little more than a Cleveland Indians shirt and cap, horn-rimmed glasses, and an attitude problem. I can manage that.

Now Halloween is behind us, and we’ve arrived at the serious winter holidays.

First up: Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving has gradually become a second-tier holiday for me. That wasn’t always the case. Like many things, it changed when I left home for college.

My sophomore year, a classmate invited me to his house for Thanksgiving. In my junior year, I stayed on campus. Foreign students and those who lived too far away joined me in the peace and quiet of an almost empty campus. By senior year, I must have made it back to Laramie.

I don’t remember having a grand Thanksgiving epiphany during those college years. I discovered that Thanksgiving could happen without my family gathered around the table.

That may be one of the things that happens when you grow up. Holidays that once seemed permanently attached to home and familiar family traditions become movable. You leave home, and the holidays follow you, but they don’t necessarily look the same.

My most memorable Thanksgiving was attending the Rolling Stones in 2005. I worked the CU – Nebraska football game that used to be played the day after Thanksgiving when both teams played in the Big 12 Conference.

Then comes Black Friday, the annual commercial prelude to Christmas, when the country collectively decides that nothing says “peace on earth” quite like getting up before dawn to fight over a discounted Sony PlayStation.

I’ve never been much of a Black Friday shopper, either. At this point in my life, if I really need something, I’m better off buying it before Thanksgiving rather than standing in line at 5 a.m. with people who have been waiting all night for a 70-inch screen. I went to Radio Shack. When they went out of business, I didn’t go out on Black Friday.

But this year, I’m approaching Black Friday differently, as I did a few years back at the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver.

On Black Friday, I’m releasing Not Exactly Holy, a devotional for the not-so-religious.

It seemed appropriate.

After all, the holiday season has always mixed the sacred and the commercial, the meaningful and the ridiculous. Thanksgiving asks us to pause and be grateful. Black Friday tells us to buy something. Christmas brings a little of both.

In the middle of all that, there’s room for a devotional written for people who aren’t entirely sure what they believe, or who don’t fit neatly into any usual religious boxes.

That’s why I wrote Not Exactly Holy.

Consider it my small contribution to the holiday season.

No assembly required. No early-morning shopping. As far as I know, no spiritual consequences.

Decoding Facebook’s Friend Suggestions for Networking Success

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I’ve been evaluating my Facebook market development strategy, and I have to admit I’m confused.

I understand how analog networking works. I meet people, find shared interests, exchange ideas, and occasionally meet someone who might buy a book, attend my film screening, or help promote a project.

Everyone’s a mark.

Then there’s Facebook and social media.

Every day, Facebook suggests that I connect with people I may know. Some suggestions come with hundreds of mutual friends. Others come with none.

Zero.

Not one person in common. No obvious connection. No digital breadcrumb trail. Me and a complete stranger whom Facebook apparently believes belongs in my social circle.

If we have so many people in common, why haven’t we met? If we have nobody in common, why should I bother?

Could be that we both like documentaries. Maybe we share an interest in baseball cards. Maybe we once stood in the same checkout line at King Soopers, although I don’t remember exchanging business cards with anyone buying Popsicles or Meow Mix.

Facebook may have confused me with the other Alan O’Hashi. Coincidentally, there are two of us. The other is an architect in San Francisco.

I can imagine the conversation.

“Alan, you know 347 people I know.”

“That’s wonderful. Which one of them are you?”

“I’m the guy Facebook says you should know.”

“Oh. What do you do?”

“I don’t know. Facebook hasn’t calculated that yet.”

Networking Without Leaving the House

Facebook has turned networking into a spectator sport. I can sit in my comfortable chair, drink coffee, and watch the algorithm parade people whose names mean absolutely nothing to me.

Some might be potential readers. Others might be filmmakers, writers, artists, or event organizers. A few might even be genuinely interesting human beings.

How am I supposed to know?

Facebook doesn’t provide a little note saying, “You should meet this person because you both have complained about the same city council meeting.”

Instead, it offers a button.

Add Friend.

Two words that carry a surprising amount of social baggage. Will I make a friend? Build a professional network? Increase my marketing reach? Help Facebook fill another row in its enormous spreadsheet of human relationships?

What happens if I approve the suggested friend? Do I get a customer? A collaborator? Somebody who invites me to invest in cryptocurrency?

The possibilities and confusions are endless.

My Market Research Department

I need a more systematic approach.

My market research department currently consists of me, a computer, and a suspicious attitude toward artificial intelligence.

I could accept every suggestion. That would increase my numbers. I might end up with 10,000 Facebook friends, most of whom I couldn’t identify in a police lineup.

I could reject everyone with zero mutual friends. That could eliminate some perfectly good connections, along with a few people Facebook has located through its mysterious electronic matchmaking service.

I could accept people with at least 100 mutual friends. Then I’d have to explain why I ignored someone with 99.

How about a scoring system?

  • One point for every mutual friend.
  • Five points for being a writer.
  • Ten points for working in film.
  • Twenty points for owning a bookstore.
  • Fifty points for being willing to buy one of my books.

I can hear Facebook objecting to the last category.

Zuck would prefer I buy some ads.

The platform prefers that I build relationships rather than openly acknowledge that I’m trying to sell my work.

Fair enough. I prefer relationships, too, but I also publish books, make documentaries, and organize creative projects. All this connecting should lead to potential customers.

Who Is Developing Whom?

Maybe I’m looking at the problem backward.

Facebook is developing me and my network as a market.

Every connection creates another opportunity to see vacation photos from Vietnam, political opinions about the Wyoming election, family reunions, inspirational quotes, and ads for products I didn’t know existed, like an iPhone tripod the size of a credit card.

Meanwhile, I scroll, searching for the people who might be interested in what I’m doing. I’ve either met or corresponded with most of my Facebook contacts. Some I’ve never met other than online. Occasionally, I’ll come across a high school classmate or a former work colleague.

I make a point of wishing my contacts a happy birthday every day. This gives me a chance to cull the list. Some haven’t been active for a year or more. Others have died.

I make a point of wishing my contacts a happy birthday daily. This gives me a chance to cull the list. Some haven’t been active for a year or more. Others have died.

Robin Dunbar, a sociologist, estimated that 150 is the number of stable social relationships a person can maintain. I went through my contacts and picked 150 people closest to me. I see their posts more often than others’.

Book publishers want to know the size of my social media base. That’s not a useful metric, considering any given user interacts with a few contacts. In my case, it’s 150.

Facebook has the data. It knows who talks to whom, who clicks on what, and who shares an interest in everything from gardening to Japanese American history. Surely it could offer a little more guidance.

“Alan, here’s a potential beta reader.”

“Here’s a filmmaker who wants to organize a film series.”

“Here’s a book influencer who might pitch your work.”

Instead, I get a suggestion to connect with someone who has 213 friends in common with me, but that’s it.

I could click Add Friend.

What do I have to lose?

A little time, a little privacy, and the illusion that I understand how social media works.

If the stranger turns out to be my next best business partner, I’ll owe Facebook an apology.

In fact, I’ve made money through social networking. That’s why I’m on Facebook in the first place. I’m trying to figure out how to do more of it.

So far, Facebook has suggested hundreds of people I might know. Some have hundreds of friends in common with me. Others have none.

Maybe one of them will become my next best business partner. Maybe I’ll sell a few books. Maybe I’ll get another invitation to invest in cryptocurrency.

If I figure out the secret, I’ll write a blog post about it.

Facebook can suggest potential readers.