I had no idea that after several months of learning Irish, all that effort would accidentally lead me to discover that Halloween was never originally associated with carving pumpkins. In Ireland, it was turnips. Yes, turnips. Freaky, carved turnips: and the National Museum of Ireland has a plaster cast of one in their permanent collection that is nothing short of a Witcher-esque aberration.

According to Clodagh Doyle, the Keeper of the Irish Folk Life Division at the National Museum of Ireland, to understand why anyone would carve a turnip into something that feels half human, half malevolent bog thing, we have to understand the importance of the festival that inspired it. (And also a whole lot of other things, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.)

The pagan festival that inspired Halloween is Samhain, a holiday that is over 3,000 years old. It also means "end of summer", and always falls on the first of November, as a way to herald the beginning of a new year.

Early calendars such as the reconstructed Coligny calendar are believed by some to separate the year into a dark half and a light half, with the dark half (winter) falling first. The dark half has strong traditional associations with superstition and death — and the day before it begins, there is a liminal, in-between period that doesn't fall into any one season at all. That liminal period is Oíche Shamhna: or the eve of Samhain.

Oíche Shamhna is interchangeable with Halloween oddly enough because of the church. A pope lobbied to have the Christian feast of All Saints moved from mid-May to November 1st sometime likely in 608. And another name for All Saints is All Hallows Tide. Mash up "All hallows" with "een", a sort of old-timey shorthand for evening, and you suddenly have All Hallows Een, or Hallowe'en.

But back to the creepy turnips, and the beliefs that inspired them.

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On the eve of Samhain, the boundary separating the known world from the Otherworld is thin. According to a talk Clodagh gave at the 2020 virtual Mayo Dark Sky Festival, it was also believed to be a time when faeries and departed human souls alike were on the move.

Clodagh explicitly uses the term fairies in her talk, and in Ireland it's common to hear them referred to casually as the good people (na daoine maithe) as well. Which sounds so effete, so charmingly camp: like you can just pop into a bit of woods and, if you're lucky, a lovely, effervescent winged creature out of the Winx Chronicles might flutter out of a tree to say "Hello, traveler!"

But in the Irish countryside, where the fog rising off of a bog feels like a set piece specifically dreamed up for the foreboding overtures of a gothic novel where superstition is an unrelenting state of mind, it turns out that a fairy is much more likely to fuck you up.

Kevin C. Olahan's excellent Irish storytelling podcast Fireside has introduced me to an incredible array of grim fairy nightmares, including:

The headless horseman known as the dullahan, which either carries its own head tucked underneath an arm or on the saddle of the horse it rides, and is commonly depicted with a whip made from a human spine.

The púca, trickster ghosts capable of shapeshifting (often into horses and goats) who are believed to urinate or spit on fruit if it hasn't been harvested by Halloween.

The will-o'-wisp, ethereal lights that appear in bogs and are feared for their ability to disappear travelers into the night. Which is brilliant, and alienating, given the anecdotal knowledge that fairy lights are a very real phenomena, just like fairy forts and even foxfire.

In Don't F*** with Fairy Forts, an episode of the Irish language podcast Motherfoclóir, Peadar sums up Irish fairies as simply "all the people who lost out, many thousands of years ago, in the battles of Moytura, and had to go to the Otherworld. They had to go underground. We get the top half, they get the underneath, and sometimes they come up and fuck with us."

He makes the brilliant point that regardless of belief in the Otherworld, protection of fairy forts (and by extension, bogs or other peatlands and their own respective land spirits) should be, and traditionally has been, seen as a matter of not just cultural heritage but a matter of land stewardship and climate advocacy.

But how, exactly, does this still actually relate to the turnip?

Families needed protection on Halloween. So a variety of rituals, including carving turnips (and sometimes potatoes) into lanterns resembling what can only be described as minions of hell were believed to discourage púcas and other unwanted guests.

In addition, turnip lanterns (and their eventual American pumpkin cousins) have more than a passing similarity to the legend of Stingy Jack: a man so wicked he wasn't even allowed to enter hell, and instead forced to wander the world with a tiny ember of coal in a hollowed-out turnip, which earned him the nickname "Jack of the Lantern" or Jack-O'-Lantern.

According to Clodagh's Mayo Dark Sky Festival talk, Halloween has also sometimes been called "Cabbage night" and a variety of games and other forms of mischief have always been mainstays of it, from kicking or throwing neighbors' cabbages, to making small stink bombs, painting animals, blocking chimneys, and attempting to scare neighbors with masks (or alternatively, simply going door-to-door to ask for treats to "Support the Halloween party").

Other traditional Halloween activities include bonfires, competitive apple games (like bobbing for apples), and a variety of divination rituals — often made in an attempt to predict marriage — that involve more cabbages, colcannon, and a fruit and nut loaf called barmbrack.