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Some people WRONGLY dismiss Halloween as a commercial American custom. Others think the origin of pumpkin jack-o'-lanterns is exclusively Irish or at least “Celtic”. In reality these lanterns are as much British as Irish, and the tradition is found in other Germanic nations such as Germany and Sweden too.

Prior to the American pumpkin tradition, people in Ireland, Scotland and England used turnips, swedes and mangelwurzels. The lanterns were associated with the Catholic holiday of All Hallow’s Eve in Ireland, but protestants in Britain sometimes moved the festival, such as in Somerset where it was held on the last Thursday of October and was called “punkie night”. Punkie means ‘jack-o-lantern’ in West Country dialect and these were carried about in a tradition much like trick or treating in America. They didn’t always have faces carved on them, but they were always intended to scare away evil.

The word punkie probably comes from Old English Pūcan or pūclas which were evil spirits in Anglo-Saxon folklore, cognate to Swedish and Norwegian puke “evil spirit”. The Irish word púca”spirit” is probably a loan from Old English as the p sound didn’t exist in primitive Gaelic.

The earliest attestations of carving such lanterns are from Worcestershire in England in 1840, Hampshire, England in 1838, and Scotland in 1808. So there is no reason to think it originated in Ireland. Various traditions of bonfires and carrying root lanterns or blazing fagots while going door to door for food existed across the British isles but the switch to pumpkins instead of turnips occurred in the USA.

The tradition of using turnip lanterns was still extant as far East as Sussex in 1973 when it was recorded among children there by Jacqueline Simpson in the Folklore of Sussex. Therefore, the introduction of the American pumpkin jack-o-lantern in Britain occurred while the native turnip tradition still existed, so there has never been a time when British people DIDNT make jack-o-lanterns for this season.

The same kind of tradition is attested in the 19th century among Germanic people on the continent who made vegetable lanterns between late October and early November. This tradition still survives in places and the lanterns are sometimes mounted on poles as they are carried about. Their names include:

German: Rübengeister ('turnip spirits')
German (Swabia): Schreckgesichter ('horror faces')
Swiss: Bochseltieren ('rumble animals')
South Germany and Lorraine, France: Rummelbooze ('turnip disguise')
German (Hesse): Gliihnische Deijwel ('glowing devil')
Swedish: rovgubbe ('turnip man')

As in the British Isles, the lanterns are often said to represent spirits and the children who carry them receive treats. Other times they are placed outside the house to protect the home from evil.

In my own video essay on the pagan origins of Halloween, I demonstrate that just as Halloween has a pagan precedent of Samhain in Ireland, it has other pagan precedents across Europe including Slavic Dziady, Baltic Mārtiņi or Mārtiņdiena, and the Germanic pagan festival which marked the start of Winter and was known in Old English as Winterfylleth, in Old Norse as Vetrnætr, and included a sacrifice made to elves (ancestral spirits) known as Álfablót.

Therefore this season has always been associated with spirits of the dead in many European cultures and Halloween is highly traditional and far from a merely commercial American innovation.