Why Do We Carve Pumpkins on Halloween? The Jack-o'-Lantern's Paper Trail

Why Do We Carve Pumpkins on Halloween? The Jack-o'-Lantern's Paper Trail

We carve pumpkins on Halloween because Irish and British emigrants carried a habit of hollowing turnips and mangel-wurzels into lanterns to North America, where the native pumpkin was bigger and softer to cut. The name is older than the custom: "jack-o'-lantern" meant a marsh light in the 1660s and a carved lantern only from the 1830s. The legend of a Jack doomed to walk with a light first reached print in Dublin in 1836, and in that version he carries no turnip at all.

If you are passing the story on to someone, keep it phone-sized. On SubhSandesh, 48.3% of the 57,456 recorded views of shared pages happen on a phone, and each page is opened 11.1 times on average, so a short tale gets reread. Below: what the word meant, the oldest texts we could open, whether the "ancient Celtic" claim holds, and why the pumpkin won.

What does "jack-o'-lantern" mean?

A jack-o'-lantern is a lantern cut from a pumpkin or root vegetable, with a face carved through the skin and a light inside. Before it was an object, it was a nickname for a man carrying a light, such as a night watchman doing his rounds with a lantern.

Wiktionary's etymology for jack-o'-lantern dates the word to the 1660s as a name for the ignis fatuus, the wandering marsh light also called will-o'-the-wisp, mostly in East Anglia and south-west England. It dates the carved-pumpkin sense to 1834. Wikipedia, citing the paywalled Oxford English Dictionary, gives 1837 instead, so treat the mid-1830s as the window rather than a single year.

That order matters. The carved lantern borrowed its name from a ghost light, not the other way round, which is why the oldest jack-o'-lantern stories are about bogs and travellers rather than vegetables.

The jack-o'-lantern legend in print: 4 dated texts

Most retellings give Stingy Jack a coin trick, a crucifix and an ember in a turnip. The earliest printed versions we could read differ, and each entry below gives the date, the text and what it leaves out.

1. 1836, Dublin: "Jack o' the Lantern" in the Dublin Penny Journal

On 16 January 1836, a writer signing as "E. W." published "Jack o' the Lantern" in the Dublin Penny Journal, volume 4. An uncle tells his nephew the tale after a marsh light rises near a bog, and the nephew's book answer, a gas from rotting plants, is waved away. In the story, a poor man who mends brogues shelters an old stranger and is granted three wishes: anyone who sits in his elbow chair, touches his box of tools, or breaks a bough of his sycamore tree stays stuck until he releases them.

He uses the wishes to trap the Devil's messengers and beat them with a flail. Heaven will not have him and hell refuses him, so "he was decreed to walk the earth with a lantern to light him on his nightly way" until judgment day. There is no turnip, no coal and no Halloween anywhere in the piece, which the writer calls a legend "commonly believed by the peasantry in many districts of Ireland."

2. 1837, New England: Hawthorne's gleaming cloak

Nathaniel Hawthorne's story "The Great Carbuncle," collected in Twice-Told Tales in 1837, uses the word as a joke. A character warns a poet that a glowing gem hidden under his cloak "will gleam through the holes, and make thee look like a jack-o'-lantern." The image is light escaping through holes, which is exactly what a pierced lantern does.

Hawthorne later gave a scarecrow in "Feathertop" a shrivelled pumpkin for a head, with "two holes for the eyes and a slit for the mouth." That face is carved, but nobody lights it. Neither text links pumpkins to 31 October.

3. 1851, Dublin and London: "Stingy Jack" in verse

The name Stingy Jack appears in "The Romance of Jack O'Lantern" in Hercules Ellis's The Rhyme Book, pages 621 to 627. Ellis follows the 1836 plot almost beat for beat: the stranger, the three wishes, the chair, the tool box, the sycamore and the flail. His hero is "stingy John," whose door turns the poor away.

The poem ends with the same light: "A lantern in his hand he bears, / The way by night to show; / And, from its flame, he's got the name / Of Jack O'Lantern now." Fifteen years after the Dublin Penny Journal, Jack still carries a lantern, not a vegetable.

4. Later retellings: the coin, the cross and the coal

The versions that dominate Halloween pages today add pieces neither early text contains. Jack tricks the Devil into becoming a coin, pins him with a cross, and is thrown a single coal, which he puts in a hollowed turnip.

We did not find when those details first reached print. The two earliest texts show only that the turnip joined the story after 1851, probably borrowed from lanterns people already carved.

Is the Stingy Jack story ancient Celtic?

Part of it is very old, but not in the way most pages claim. A 2016 study in Royal Society Open Science by Sara Graça da Silva and Jamshid Tehrani mapped 275 magic tales across 50 Indo-European-speaking populations. It traced one, catalogued as ATU 330 "The Smith and the Devil," back to Proto-Indo-European with a posterior probability of 87%, which puts it in the Bronze Age.

The study describes that tale's core plot as a smith who strikes a deal with the Devil and uses his reward to stick the villain to an immovable object such as a tree. That is the skeleton of the 1836 Dublin tale, chair and sycamore included. So the trick story is ancient and shared from India to Scandinavia, not specifically Irish or Celtic.

The lantern, the turnip and Halloween are a different matter. Popular pages often say Celts carved turnips at Samhain 2,000 years ago, but none of the five we analysed cites an ancient text for it. The safest reading is that an old wandering tale met a nineteenth-century lantern custom, and the two were later told as one.

Turnips, mangel-wurzels and pumpkins: why the pumpkin won

Before the pumpkin, the lantern was whatever root sat in the field. In Somerset, children still carry "punkies" cut from mangel-wurzels, a large fodder beet, on Punkie Night, the last Thursday of October: 29 October in 2026 and 28 October in 2027. Elsewhere in Britain and Ireland the turnip or swede did the job.

The pumpkin was the local root in America. A 2012 genetics study of Cucurbita pepo by Gong and colleagues notes that the species is native to North America, grows wild in the southern United States and north-eastern Mexico, and was domesticated twice. Domesticated remains about 10,000 years old come from Oaxaca, and remains about 5,000 years old from eastern North America.

So the switch needed no invention. Emigrants found a hollow-friendly crop that had been grown on the continent for millennia, ripened in autumn, and was big enough to carve a whole face into rather than a few slits.

The pumpkin business today

The jack-o'-lantern now rides on a large farm economy. The USDA Economic Research Service reports a 2025 US harvest of 1.47 billion pounds. Roughly 533 million of those pounds came from Illinois, where most fields grow pie types for canning, so the porch pumpkin is only one market among several.

Four lanterns compared: material, place and date

The table lines up four forms of the lantern, with dates drawn only from the sources above.

The takeaway: the word, the tale and the vegetable each have a separate history, and they met only in the nineteenth century.

Telling the 1836 version to someone

The 1836 version makes a better letter than the usual one, because almost nobody has heard it. Tell someone about the man who mended brogues, the sycamore that held the Devil, and the lantern he still carries, then give them a pumpkin to light.

The interactive Halloween card where they carve a jack-o'-lantern suits a quick send: up to six photos, a letter they read by flashlight, about 5 minutes to make. They cut the pumpkin open on screen until its candle catches and your word shows through the face. Its closing question, "Will you be my boo?", has a No button that runs away, so pick the partner mode only for someone whose yes you already have, or switch to bestie, family or kids.

For someone you want to give more time to, the cinematic Halloween page with a voice note and a pumpkin that lights your initials takes about 10 minutes. It holds up to 12 photos, a voice note up to 60 seconds, an optional unlock time and a reply box. Across the platform, 90.9% of started pages end up published and shared.

For someone who skips Halloween entirely, browse every SubhSandesh template for an occasion that suits them instead.

Where a link loses to a real pumpkin

If the person lives with you, carve a real one together. A link cannot give the smell of pumpkin flesh or a candle flickering on the step, and the 1836 tale was told aloud by an uncle on a walk home, not read.

Both pages are one-person greetings in English, not a party tool or a history lesson for a classroom of 30. And a page cannot settle the history: the sources here fix dates for the word, two early texts and the plant, but the first turnip in the story remains undated.

Sources

• Wiktionary, "jack-o'-lantern" (undated entry).
• E. W., "Jack o' the Lantern", Dublin Penny Journal, 16 January 1836.
• Hercules Ellis, The Rhyme Book, 1851, pages 621 to 627.
• Graça da Silva and Tehrani, Royal Society Open Science, 20 January 2016.
• Gong and colleagues, Theoretical and Applied Genetics, 2012.
• USDA ERS, Pumpkins: Background & Statistics, revised 29 September 2026.