When is a pumpkin not a pumkin?

Answer

When it is a turnip!

Yes, growing up in Ireland, we did not have pumpkins filling every shop on the weeks preceding Halloween. Halloween was a much less commercial event, and in mainland UK Halloween was overshadowed by Guy Fawkes Night on 5 November. As a child we had to make do with turnips to make our Halloween lanterns.

Halloween first was celebrated in the United States in the 1840s, when Irish Catholics, fleeing from the potato famine, brought Halloween customs with them to America. The tradition of carving pumpkins into jack-o’-lanterns originated with Irish children who carved out the centers of rutabagas, turnips and potatoes and placed candles inside.

There are many reasons why turnips were never a great success in our family

• Turnips have the density of a brick – no hollow inside with seeds and soft fleshy bits
• They are not orange
• They are not cute
• They take hours to carve out
• They usually resulted in bending one of our Mum’s metal spoons
• Sometimes there were even blisters!

I could not believe the ease of pumpkin carving until we scooped out our first one with our kids….a breeze…..a dream…..a walk in the park……I could go on!

This blog post is both for BYOP and Show & Tell (I like to multi-task!)

This is a digi-layout of our kids pumpkin carving last October.

Here are our carving adventures from this year (no blood, sweat, tears or turnips!)

And the final results

I also want to share are very minimal Halloween decorations. As Christians, we do not focus much on Halloween, however we do not totally avoid it either. I appreciate each family makes their own decisions on this, but I found my thoughts echoed well in THIS BLOG POST.

So we decorate with a few pumpkins (not turnips), the kids dress up (but nothing too scary or horrific) and we do Trick or Treating with the kids in our cul-de-sac.

Here are our scary kids this year

This is our “wee spider” man!

And here are our decorations

This is on the hall table

The cobwebs are not real – promise! A few very non-threatening ghosts

Some more pumpkins, on a garland and some mini candles.

So what do you do? For more Show and Tell visit Kelli, and for more Halloween decor visit We are THAT family.

Finally, for one last time(!) a reminder to click over to my Digital Design Blog (J M Digital Designs) and enter my Giveaway – it closes at midnight 31 October.