I always enjoy this time of year because Halloween is a time for carving pumpkins. You probably know the custom of cutting two eyes and a mouth into a pumpkin at Halloween time, then putting a candle inside so it looks like the face of a monster. This is called a “jack o’lantern”, and it is based on an old legend from England, Ireland and Scotland. The belief was that bad ghosts could come back to Earth one night a year to try to get inside people’s houses, and that Halloween was that night. People hoped that by placing a scary jack o’lantern in the window, the ghosts would think “There’s already a ghost in this house”, and leave that family alone.
For hundreds of years the carving was always a face (SEE FIRST PHOTO), and the knife cut all the way through the skin of the pumpkin. This makes the light of the candle shine through very brightly. However, in recent years many artists have shown that by cutting only partway into the pumpkin, it’s possible to make the light shine through in different shades of light. They also realized that it’s possible to carve any kind of image, not only scary faces.
I enjoy doing this myself. For example, one year I created a wolf howling at the moon (SECOND PHOTO) and recently I made an image of a popular character from the Star Wars series that many people call Baby Yoda (THIRD PHOTO).
What image will I use for my pumpkin this year? I can’t tell you. That would spoil the surprise! Don’t worry; you’ll see it soon!