halloween

Halloween

Here is a blog for Charlie Brown fans.

The Great Pumpkin.

The Great Pumokin

 

There was a ghost of halloween, and, as Linus knows,

it walks at this time of year.

You go sit in a pumpkin patch, and see if it comes......

The jack o'lantern. 

In  some versions of the story of Sleepy Hollow, the ghost threw a pumpkin's

head at Ichabod Crane.

Samhain, it's called really, a festival leading from harvest into 

the dark land of the dead, e.g. winter.

When it was begun presumably more common root vegetables

were used than pumpkins to make a face. 

They would needs be a large one, say a huge turnip.

The tradition of the Halloween pumpkin doesn't really emerge 

until the early nineteen hundreds.

The Jack o'lantern is perhaps earlier.

I read that the pumpkins were "sacrificed" to bonfires in the fields, 

so what more natural than that the spirits dancing in the flames should take

pumpkin shape. Maybe Linus was right after all?