When People Carved Turnips Instead of Pumpkins for Halloween | Hacker News Reader

When People Carved Turnips Instead of Pumpkins for Halloween

smithsonianmag.com

58 pointssamizdis32 comments

I carved turnips when I was younger, maybe only 30 (previously said 40) years ago. Pumpkins were expensive back then and the tradition, for my parents when they were younger, back in Ireland was to carve a turnip. You would do it much the same except you would add a handle and be able to carry it around with you at night. It was a lot more work to carve but it was great for trick or treating, especially when cheap torches were not so easily available.

Another (Northern) Irishman here - I too remember vividly carving out rather small turnips as a kid in the late 80s and 90s. The small size and difficulty in carving it for me always ended up making for a rather creepy but oddly friendly looking grin.

North of England up as a small child in the 80's as well.

Pumpkins weren't really a thing here until much later.

Same in the Isle of Man.

Pumpkins only became more popular in the 90s. Turnip/Swede (moots) all the way.

One event this year has swede ice cream!

Whoah. Isle of Man representing on HN. I've reached the end of the Internet.

Also: turnip boy here. Don't think I even saw a pumpkin until I was in my late teens.

Since 2009 :)

We should have a Manx HN meet up sometime!

Same here, turnip was the tradition in Ireland in the 80s/90s, pumpkins were an American import.

Like others have said, it was hard work :)

Same for me, in Scotland. When I was young (~ 40 years ago) it was Turnips lanterns we had.

Yeah pumpkins only became popular when kids started trick or treating up here. Before it was turnips and guising

I first heard about this from the pizza effect Wikipedia page:

> The creation of jack-o'-lanterns from turnips (rutabaga) was a Halloween custom in Ireland and parts of Great Britain. Irish immigrants brought this tradition with them to the United States, and adapted it to use native pumpkins instead of turnips. In time, pumpkins came to be used instead of turnips to create jack-o'-lanterns in Ireland and Great Britain. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_effect#Ireland

EDIT: There’s also more information in the article Wikipedia cites [1]

[1]: https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/food-and-drink/hal...

Fascinating. This kind of reminds me of people's romanticized views of the past. And it supports my theory that "returning" to a past that never was is possible and maybe even desirable.

In Switzerland, turnip lanterns are still seen as the genuine tradition, and pumpkin carving, while decidedly more fun, as an imported custom.

The Swiss style turnip lantern generally does not use faces, but is mostly ornamental (Using cookie cutter shapes for those not skilled at free hand carving). Instead of cutting holes, only the outer skin is supposed to be removed, which takes even greater skill of hollowing out the turnip.

The children then assemble in parades with their turnip lanterns. Turnips are definitely more convenient for parading, and pumpkins for stationary displays, so I see both traditions coexisting here.

This is still pretty common in Scotland - I've done it mostly every year since I was a child. They give you a much creepier lantern than pumpkins do, but they can smell awful as the candle cooks them a bit, and they collapse spectacularly over the next few days.

Fellow Scot here - it was always turnips where I grew up, but even in rural areas it's mostly pumpkins nowadays. There are still a few holdouts though, mostly those adverse to the "Americanisation" of traditions.

Yes, it was turnips (known as swedes in England and rutabaga in the US) when I was young too.

We also did guising, i.e. the dressing up and going around houses, which turned into trick or treating when it was exported to the US. The US-style trick or treating was starting to be re-imported when I was young, but (certainly where I was) it wasn't looked upon very favourably because it was usually practised by the rougher sorts who used it as an excuse to throw eggs at peoples homes (the traditional guising hadn't had the "trick" element).

Just for info, we call them "neeps" here in Scotland, but they are actually swedes as you say.

I mean, pumpkins are a New World plant, so would be strange if they had been historically used on the British Isles.

True, but it’s interesting… some of those new world plants spread so quickly that, for instance, many New World foods were first introduced to the US from the Old World, and knowledge that they were actually New World would have been quite limited.

For instance, chile peppers spread from South America so quickly that subsequent explorers of Africa, China, etc. misidentified them as being native to those and other places.

In the US, even among native communities, chile peppers arrived largely with slaves from Africa, and were thought of as exotic.

Tomatoes in North America had pretty much the same journey - from South/Central America to Europe, then back to the Americas, where they didn't really catch on for quite a while.

Kids just don't learn to carve 'neeps the way they used to. ... Life is Neeps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypsNiixwLXQ

Same in Southern Germany 40 years ago. We would carve faces into turnips. After dark we would put a small candle inside & place them in front of a neighbour‘s door. We rang the bell and hid. If the „turnip-ghosts“ were to the neighbours‘ delight, they would put a few coins or treats next to them. We did this for the whole neighbourhood.

Once a guy who moved in only recently from a different area in Germany wasn’t aware of the tradition. He took them inside! We were probably equally offended by this reaction as he was by what he must have thought was a very strange way to say „welcome“ from his new neighbours in this godforsaken place he got stranded for a job :D

I've always found it very interesting how this ancient tradition evolved while still keeping true to it's origins. North America was largely settled by people from the isles, particularly Irish and Scotsmen, and the tradition adapted a native plant and it became a classic American tradition all it's own. Then to see that slight change in the ancient tradition spread from North America again, it makes you wonder how future anthropologists will interpret this change, whether they will understand all the cultural and social and economic dynamics that went into it.

As an '80s kid, swedes/turnips were the norm in my hometown in the UK.

We did this when I was a kid in Lincolnshire, which has a lot of turnips.

Wow there are a lot of people from the North of England here. I'm from Sunderland and it was turnips in the 80s. For the full tick you had to go and nick them out of the farmers field, no organised pumpkin picking for us! Someone told me they managed to spend 70 pounds on a pumpkin picking trip last week with 2 children, I think the farmer was a master of upselling!

I grew up in the North of England and remember going out trick or treating with my uncle and cousins about 40 years ago. We carved turnips into jack o'lanterns, and threaded string to carry them.

Where I come from (South West England) turnips are too small to make carving easy, do they really mean swedes? That is Swedish turnips, known as rutabaga in the US,

Yes, the article refers to what are called turnips (or neeps) in Scotland, i.e. the big yellowish ones that you make neeps and tatties with. I think they're known as swedes in England (although swede in Scotland often refers to the small white ones which I think are called turnips in England).

Yes, it can be very confusing. My late wife was from Orkney and I am from Wiltshire where turnips are relatively small white root vegetables that are typically fed to livestock so there was plenty of scope for confusion. Not to mention that what I call a bun she called a cookie which got extra confusing when we visited the US.

Dunno, rutabagas are mostly called yellow turnips around here. They're all brassicas in the end.

Last year we used a projector to add stencils to the pumpkin by using a small dremel to make the outline. Super easy to do and fun for the kids!

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