Carved

Challenge: Weekly Prompts: Weekend Challenge
Topic: All Hallows Eve

This weekend GC and Sue ask:

It’s Halloween and the Weekend Challenge from partner GC and me is All Hallows Eve.
A scary apparition – a figment of your imagination or is the spectre real? Is it a shadow in the corner, or a spirit from beyond, a phantom, a ghostly presence or someone in disguise?
A wide-open challenge, something to get your fangs into.

This year I wont be carving a Pumpkin, well not a ‘traditional’ orange one any way, maybe I will get one of the small crown prince squash we have in the garden and carve that.

So why did I put ‘traditional’ in inverted commas? Well for me it has never been traditional, the pumpkin not being traditionally grown in Wales. When I was small on the night of ‘Nos Calan Gaeaf’, I would carve a jack-o’-lantern out of a turnip, this is something I have been meaning to do again for years, though I remember it being very hard.

Once we had it hollowed out, and with a skull like face carved in, we would punch holes in the sides for a piece of string , and pop a candle inside.

There was no trick or treating until I had grown up, or if there was I did not do it, people did not throw eggs and flour, nor did we dress up, although you might catch a glimpse of someone covered in a sheet, or maybe it was a ghost. But I might venture outside for a walk with my grandmother, taking our lanterns, we would pass others doing the same. Always being courteous to nod or speak a greeting to those we encountered, but not with their real names in case the fairies or the spirits heard us!

Anyway alas this year I have no photo of a carved turnip for you, but here is a pumpkin from a few years ago.

‘Carved’
2011

Ken