Jack’O’Lanterns, Pumpkins & the Hobgoblin of Communism
The pumpkin of course is a relatively modern part of Halloween, the invented tradition originating from America.
The doesn’t mean that there was no tradition, although until the twentieth century it seems to have been confined mainly to Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Somerset(see Ronald Hutton, Stations of the Sun). The vegetables used traditionally for a jack’o’lantern were either turnips or mangel wurzels.
Hutton notes that they were ‘carved out with grotesque faces to represent spirits or goblins’.
In that context its worth keeping in mind that the opening line of the Communist Manifesto talks of not a ‘spectre’ haunting Europe but as the original English translation by Helen Macfarlane in the Chartist Red Republican paper in November 1850 had it, a ‘frightful hobgoblin’ stalks Europe.
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