If there is one image that Halloween conjures up for most of us it is the carved out orange jack-o-lantern pumpkin, with its ghoulish face lit up by a flickering candle inside.
Although jack-o-lanterns are carved from pumpkins in the United States, the tradition began differently. Halloween celebrations in Scotland and Ireland originally involved the use of similar, yet smaller jack-o-lanterns that were made out of turnips. Pumpkins, though, whose orange color has come to be directly related with Halloween, are a lot easier to work with while carving out a face.
When choosing a pumpkin to use as a jack-o-lantern, make sure that it is not overly ripe. If a pumpkin has strong smell or sounds hollow when you tap on the outside of it, it is too ripe to be used. Don’t forget to seriously consider the color, shape, and overall condition of the pumpkin when making your selection. You want to pick the very best pumpkin you can for your jack-o-lantern. And, after picking one out, don’t hold onto it by its stem, since it could snap apart and leave you with a squashed pumpkin instead of a jack-o-lantern.
The first steps in turning a plain old pumpkin into a scary Halloween jack-o-lantern are cleaning it, drying it, and cutting off the top part where the stem is located. Then, get all of the soft flesh and seeds out of the pumpkin. You will want to be left with just the thick surface of the pumpkin flesh. Since you need to be able to place a short candle inside the pumpkin, it is also important that you make sure that you leave the bottom of it flat, stable, and reasonably smooth.
A large spoon is a good utensil to use inside a pumpkin. You are now ready to carve the face onto the pumpkin.
Some people grab a kitchen knife at this point, and start hacking away. There is a better approach. First, work on your design. You can buy stencils with intricate jack-o-lantern faces, or you can design your own on a sheet of paper with a pen or pencil. You might even find one you could print from the internet. A great design makes all the difference to how your jack-o-lantern will look, and will likely be a lot more detailed than something you work on as you go.
Place your paper over the pumpkin and hold it where you want the face to be with some sticky tape. Now work your way around the design outline with a skewer, or something else that is sharply pointed, and mark a line of close dots through the paper and into your pumpkin.
When you take the paper off, your design will be outlined on the pumpkin and very easy to carve out exactly how you want it.