Halloween may put the frighteners on some young children and on their parents too, and while celebrating it has been gaining in popularity in Britain, its customs are a long way from the cuddly image they have in America.
However, one Halloween tradition you can enjoy with children of any age, that's more fun than scary, is making a jack o'lantern. Here's how to do it the American way.
Your best bet for finding the right kind of jack o'lantern pumpkin is the supermarket. But forget those silly stick-on patterns and special carving implements they try to sell them with. You'd have to be Michelangelo to cut those designs. Also forget whatever you may have learned as a child to do with swedes or turnips.
Also, for now, forget eating them. You don't want the pale-skinned, flattened kind of pumpkins you find at the greengrocer's for cooking. The jack o'lantern pumpkin is bright orange outside and stringy and seedy but mostly hollow inside, with a shell about an inch thick. Test your specimens by setting them on a flat surface to see if they'll sit up by themselves, and look for a bit of green stem for a lid handle. Most important, they need to have one broad, un-bumpy orange side for the face. Go on, go for a big one. Supermarkets may charge a flat price, but even if they sell their pumpkins by weight a good one shouldn't set you back more than 4 or so. Take care to get it home without dropping it or rolling it around, and don't let the stem break off.
Armed with a sharp knife and some sharp-rimmed kitchen spoons, approach your chosen pumpkin on a spread of newspapers on the kitchen floor or table. Tell the children to sit at a safe distance and watch until it's opened.
Now it's the carving technique that matters. The first cut is the deepest, as they say. You're cutting a lid that is going to fit back on so neatly that it won't fall inside and you won't see the joins. Slice a four-or five-sided shape about the size of your hand at the top centred around the pumpkin's stem. Aim the knife at an angle slightly towards the centre all the way around, rather than straight down, so the lid has something to sit on, as on a sugar bowl. Forget those silly things you may have seen people doing with toothpicks to hold the lid up.
The mushy stuff
Here comes the kids' part. Pull the lid off (this may take some yanking on the strings) and let the children dive in. Keep your knife at bay awhile and let the children stick their hands in the wonderful gooey muck. Watch them swill it around, pull it out, squish it, throw it at the cat, squeeze the seeds from the mush. (You may fear they'll try to swallow the seeds, but one taste and they'll probably abandon it.) Eventually the children will want to set the seeds aside and save them for planting in the garden later (they're bred not to grow, but let the kids have their fun). Better still to let the seeds dry out and then paint them and glue them into mosaics in your art activities.
It can be the children's job to scrape the seeds and stringy stuff from the inside of the pumpkin shell, using metal kitchen spoons. You'll probably have to do the last scrape yourself for a really smooth surface.
Before you throw out the mush from the inside, bear in mind that for older children with macabre interests it provides a perfect ingredient if they set up one of those 'haunted houses' where they make their friends stick their hands in a bowl of 'guts' or 'brains' without seeing what it is - along with cold spaghetti snakes and hardboiled egg eyeballs.
Now, back to your pumpkin. Wipe the outer shell dry and use a black crayon or felt-tip (which can be wiped off later) to draw an outline for the facial features you're going to cut. Consult with the children, and forget those impossible designs for witches and broomsticks and whatever were on the supermarket's stickers. Do the children want a happy face? An angry face? A spooky, moaning ghost face? You can express a lot with just two eyes, a nose and mouth (and teeth). In fact, it's best to buy two or three pumpkins so you can have a variety of expressions and shapes.
You're going to put a candle in this thing and make it shine as brightly as possible, so don't arrange the facial features too close together - spread them out, with a broad mouth that can curve up in a grin or down in a growl. Eyes could be cut with bumps for pupils, and teeth can be square or pointed, but be sure to space them out in a big opening to let lots of light through.
The children will have to stand back again as you carve out the facial bits with a knife. But they can enjoy poking the chunks out like puzzle pieces once they're cut - or rather, poke them in, because when you cut the face, angle the knife in the opposite direction that you did the lid, away from the centre, so the cut-out shape is actually wider on the inside than on the outside. This will let out more light.
When you're done, wipe off the remaining bits of muck and shell and crayon.
Use a spoon to scoop out a little hollow in the bottom centre to hold a candle. The basic household candle you keep for when the electricity goes out works best. Light it and let a few drips of hot wax fall into the hollow to stand the candle up in (children meanwhile watching and learning but not doing!). You may need to cut or melt the candle down, depending on how far the flame is from the lid of the pumpkin when you put it back on, although a blackened inside lid doesn't really hurt anything. When you display the lit jack o'lantern, even with the lid on, just don't place it where there are curtains or anything that could catch fire overhead.
Shining faces
Now turn out the lights and admire your spooky work! Family members can view it indoors, or put the jack o'lantern on a windowsill facing out for passers-by and trick-or-treaters to see.
If you're working on Halloween evening you could dress up the children and take them and their friends calling at a few trusted houses in the neighbourhood for trick-or-treat. More and more people are beginning to anticipate callers on 31 October and have sweets ready - and you may even see some rival jack o'lanterns.
Then there's the aftermath. After three days or so a carved-out pumpkin will start to go soft and mushy, so if you're still up for messy play, it makes a lovely splat when you throw it at the pavement! Clean it up and say bye-bye 'til next year.
