This is your annual reminder that we know next to nothing about Samhain or its relationship to Halloween, that all Halloween customs have supposedly Christian origins just as convincing as their supposed pagan origins, and that none of this should matter anyway because every agricultural society has harvest festivals and cultural borrowing is the norm.
Anyway, in our last episode, I mentioned that the magical girls and I purchased pumpkins for carving. I planned to create a magical girl-themed Jack-O’-Lantern; I wanted such a theme both so I could display it on this blog and also just on principle. However, my main magical girl hadn’t carved a Jack-O’-Lantern before, so she wanted a more traditional one.
Since I’m not a master pumpkin carver and was not working with any fancy tools, I wanted a simple pattern.
I chose this:
Now, I already know what you’re thinking: It looks simple at a glance, but it actually has a lot of small, delicate details and very little to hold the construction together.
At first, I was doing pretty well and thought I would get this right, but I eventually made some wrong moves. I lost the area below her arm, so I had to reattach it with toothpicks, but my biggest mistake was carving the moon out last, thinking I should do the delicate work first. I ended up with this:
That’s the magical girl diligently working on her own in the background there. She was also laughing at me.
If carved correctly, the design has delicate spots that leave large parts of the image supported by tiny bits of the pumpkin’s rind. I broke through a couple by applying too much pressure. The result was what you see here: I shattered the entire image like an eighth-century iconoclast.
My wife, who judiciously wanted a simpler, more classic design, was entirely successful in her carving endeavor. She and the other magical girl who can never leave her worked diligently, and now their Jack-O’-Lantern, made from a stencil my wife chose because it made her giggle, adorns the top of the post. I don’t have any tea candles to show it in all its glory, but I’ll undoubtedly display it lit up at a later date.
