Poetry Friday: Pumpkin Dance

See the little pumpkin, walking down the street,

Knocking here and knocking there and shouting “trick or treat!”

Halloween is almost here! My son wants to be a jack-o-lantern for the third year in a row, and since his costume from last year still fits, I am more than happy to oblige! It’s a good costume for trick or treating in northern climes, as it can easily slip over a bulky winter coat for maximum warmth when hunting for sweets. I always remember being so frustrated as a child when my mother (rightly) insisted I had to cover up my wonderful costume with layer after layer of warm clothes before I could go out in search of candy!

The popular tradition of pumpkin carving is said to date back to the mid 1800s, when Irish immigrants brought their tradition of carving turnips with them to America. Pumpkins, which are indigenous to North America, were easy to find and provided an even larger canvas for carving, and quickly replaced the original root vegetables as the preferred lantern medium. The Jack in jack-o-lantern refers to the Irish folk tale of “Stingy Jack”, which tells the tale of a man who tried to trick the devil and was cursed to an eternity of wandering the earth for his troubles. According to the folk tale, after neither Heaven nor Hell would take his tricksy soul, Jack carved out a turnip, lit it with an ember taken directly from hell, and still uses it to guide his endless ghostly travels to this day. Well, that’ll teach you to try and match wits with the prince of darkness himself!

Like many people in North America, I have Irish heritage, though I never heard the tale of Stingy Jack as a child. My experiences of Halloween are entirely North American, with trick-or-treating, costumes and pumpkin carving being annual highlights. As a child, most of my costumes were put together by my parents from random items we already had at home – very few kids I knew actually had store-bought costumes! I was a witch, a ghost, a pirate, a doctor, a hobo…all very generic 80s and 90s children’s costumes. Apparently this year the characters from the hit animated movie Kpop Demon Hunters are the prefered costume inspirations – thankfully my son doesn’t really watch cartoons, so I don’t have to try and figure out how on Earth I’d put something like that together with my meager crafting skills.

My son is very particular about his Halloween treats – he only likes chocolate, so all the delicious gummies and licorice and caramels and other sugary goodies are mine, mine, mine! I mean, it would be a shame to waste any of those trick or treat goodies, right??

Patricia is our wonderful Poetry Friday host this week!