Pumpkins for Hallowe'en

News this morning from the BBC about the problems facing pumpkin growers in the UK. Not that it seems to have affected our friends at Northern Harvest, mind you. As you can tell from the photo, we're going to have a rather large jack o'lantern to stick a candle in at the end of October through into November!

There's all sorts of guff about Hallowe'en (there'll perhaps be more on that later!), but the American innovation of using a pumpkin for a jack o'lantern is a good one. The glowing orange is more dramatic than the swede that may well have been used for the English equivalent home-made lantern.

Hallowe'en has made a dramatic impact on this time of year within our lifetimes - encouraged by the plethora of depictions of American customs in TV shows and films like E.T. There was someone moaning in the Guardian yesterday about how it was overshadowing Bonfire Night. There's no need to be quite so grumpy. And there's certainly no need to spout a load of guff about 'Samhain' (whatever that was) being some astonishingly pagan Celtic (whatever 'Celtic' means) festival that underwent some mythical forced evolution into a 'sanitised' Christian festival. Honestly, the sooner this kind of cliche dies a death, the better.

We found out the other day that there is some evidence (according to Steve Roud in The English Year) that mimsyish teachers, worried about the dangers of Bonfire Night, encouraged Hallowe'en as a safer alternative during the 1970s and 80s. So it seems that teachers are to blame. ;-)

But as ever it seems odd to berate people for doing the 'wrong' thing, or celebrating the wrong day in the wrong way. Whatever its source, it looks like Hallowe'en, however naff and consumerist many of its trappings are, is here to stay.

The insides of our pumpkin are going to be turned into chutney, by the way.