Thread: The transatlantic Halloween divide

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From the bbc online, boy your Brits sure are fascinated by our fascination with Halloween!

They also have a few quotes from Steve O'Connor at Garage of Evil.

Could someone pleeease tell me how you carve a turnip?!? From the pics I've seen it seems to produce just typical jack o lantern faces & I'd think it'd be kinda difficult. But it seems to really upset folks over there that people are carving pumpkins & not turnips anymore.

Yes this is nice


But not as nice as this:


Or even this

Turnip carvings on my side of the channel are all but defunct and i can only speak for myself but i don't think i've ever met anyone upset that we carve pumpkins now in there place...
During my childhood/youth we always wanted pumpkins but they just weren't available so we made do with turnips which are somewhat more difficult to carve (the flesh needed to be cut out with a sharp knife rather than spooned out) as much as i love those memories of black bag costumes and turnip lanterns i wouldn't give up my pumpkins for love nor money

I'm a bit of an Anglophile so I don't have the least thing to say about what my friends across the pond think of me and my weird American practices. It's all good. I agree that Americans took Halloween and made it into...well, into something HUGE. And I'm glad. But I though the article was cute. It was rather tongue-in-cheek. Compare it, for example, to the REALLY scathing (U.S.-written, I think) one that was posted some time ago on here...Anyone have a link? This one was cute and funny and was more of a shaking-one's-head-and-chuckling sort of thing than anything cruel.

By the way, I have NEVER carved a turnip because I'm sure I would slice my thumb off in the process. But dang do those things look cool. Sooooooooooo spooky.