How to make a pumpkin for Halloween: master class and original ideas

history of the holiday

The holiday is very unusual in terms of its appearance. This holiday is now a mixture of cultural traditions and beliefs of the Celts and Romans, and Christianity has added its own specifics. The Celts left behind the date of the holiday - October 31st. The ancient Celtic people worshiped the forces of nature. The Celtic priests, the Druids, divided the year into two halves - winter and summer. The night from October 31 to November 1 was considered the transition from summer to winter, and it was on this day that the gates of the other world opened. In honor of this, the Samhain festival was held, an obligatory part of which was making sacrifices to the spirits of dark forces.

When the warlike Romans conquered the Celtic lands and brought their traditions, it turned out that they themselves had a holiday, which was also celebrated on the night of October 31 to November 1. This holiday was in honor of the goddess of plants - Pomona. Thus, thanks to a fortunate coincidence, the Celtic and Roman holidays came together. It should be noted here that this was facilitated by the fact that both of them celebrated the day of the dead that night.

The arrival of Christianity brought its own additions. In order not to destroy established traditions and firmly consolidate the Christian faith, Pope Gregory III decided to celebrate All Saints' Day not on May 13, but on November 1. This is a brief history of Halloween, which, having undergone several metamorphoses in different eras, became known as the holiday Halloween - All Saints' Day, when all kinds of evil spirits come out of the other world, and restless souls can come to any home.

How to Carve a Halloween Pumpkin - Tools You Need

It’s easy to make a pumpkin for All Saints’ Day with your own hands, the main thing is to have everything you need on hand:

A beautiful pumpkin of medium size and regular shape.
Any sharp tools (awls, sets of sharp knives, needles).
A large tablespoon, scraper or spatula.
A marker that washes off easily, or a stencil for a drawing template.
Candles, flashlight or garland for illumination.

Halloween Traditions

The celebration of Halloween is a fun mixture of pagan and Christian traditions. Pagan festivals manifest themselves in our time in the tradition of dressing up in costumes and transforming into a variety of evil spirits, witches, sorcerers, dead people, ghosts. There is a huge scope for creativity - you need to work hard on the costume in advance. In addition, adults and children come up with ways to scare each other more and develop interesting attractions.

Even on this day, adults and children, dressed in costumes, go from house to house begging for sweets. This custom is called “Treat or it will be worse.” This holiday is also famous for its various fortune telling.

Halloween gives you the opportunity to use your creativity by creating Halloween crafts with your kids. And to make the holiday unforgettably interesting, you can organize a party with friends. To do this, you need to decorate your home by purchasing or making various Halloween accessories yourself.

Crafts for the holiday

There are many interesting crafts you can make for Halloween. For example, you can make lanterns from glass jars. To do this, you should cover the jars with colored translucent or plain paper, draw or cut out scary faces on it and place a candle inside to create a special atmosphere of an open fire.

Ghost garlands made of paper or balloons with a ghost drawn on them with felt-tip pens also look very funny. Spiders and pumpkins sewn from fabric and hung on the walls will look very scary. You can also decorate the windows by gluing images of ghosts and paper pumpkins onto the glass.

But the most important accessory will be, of course, a real Halloween pumpkin. And if the problem of how to make a pumpkin for Halloween, how to carve a pumpkin for Halloween is not worthwhile in Western countries, then in Russia it is quite relevant.

What else can be made from vegetables?

As already noted, a pumpkin for Halloween can be a wonderful decorative item, you just need to get creative with the design. If the process involves small children who should not be given a knife, try doing a variety of interesting things. For example, a Halloween pumpkin can be funny, kind, or interesting, bright and colorful.

By the way! To make an interesting pumpkin with your own hands, you don’t have to carve it. There are many other original ideas!

How to decorate a pumpkin for Halloween? Firstly, you can simply paint the pumpkin . To do this, you need to choose a white or light yellow vegetable - this way the paint will lie more beautifully. How else can you decorate a vegetable for Halloween?

Paint in pastel colors.
Take 7 small fruits and paint them in the colors of the rainbow.
Make a gradient coloring.
Place black, white and bright orange lanterns around the house.
Decorate the vegetable with black and white stripes, checkered patterns or polka dots.
Decorate your Halloween pumpkin with colorful handprints.
Draw a face with paints instead of cutting it out.
Decorate it like a large donut with colored icing and sprinkles.
Cover the vegetable with fluorescent paint to make it glow at night.
Decorate with an ornament of cobwebs and spiders.
Paint an autumn landscape or still life.

These are not all the options for Halloween pumpkin crafts; you can come up with even more yourself.

Jack-o'-lantern

Halloween pumpkin is also called Jack-O-Lantern. It is believed that if there is a pumpkin with a face carved into it and a candle inside near a house, then Jack will not enter such a house and will not bring trouble. Stingy Jack is a character from an ancient legend. Stingy Jack did not deserve heaven for his unrighteous life, and for deceiving the devil, he was not allowed into hell. He is forced to wander between worlds, useless and doomed, lighting his path with a jack-o'-lantern with a coal inside. Only for one night he comes down to earth and can do some nasty things to someone.

So, those who are afraid of Stingy Jack or simply want to create a holiday atmosphere simply need to know how to make a pumpkin for Halloween. It is best to entrust this event to children - they will be delighted!

First of all, you should give the children a task - to draw the most sinister, scary, vengeful face on a piece of paper. While they are painting, start looking for pumpkins. It is best to buy several of them in order to find a use for all the faces that will be drawn by children. Pumpkins should be large and strong enough; ideally, if the pumpkin is tall, a larger candle will fit.

Lamp manufacturing stages:

prepare sharp knives, you can use wood carving tools and tablespoons;
choose the drawings you like from those made by the children and apply them to the pumpkins: if the drawings are smaller or larger, redraw them on sheets of paper suitable for the size of the fruit;
cut out templates from ready-made drawings;
take care of the pumpkins: cut out the “lid” on top and carefully remove the pulp from the pumpkin using spoons;
when the pumpkin is completely ready, attach the template to it and trace all the lines of the design with a marker;
Using a small sharp knife or cutter, cut out a design on the pumpkin, do it very carefully;
When the design on the pumpkin is cut out, the final chord remains - insert a candle and close the pumpkin with a lid.

Place your lanterns in the yard, light some candles and welcome your guests. And your holiday will be no less bright and solemn, no worse than that of the ancient Celts!

Video on how to make a pumpkin from balloons for Halloween / Pumpkin of balloons for Halloween

Carving an original pumpkin lantern with your own hands

The origins of this holiday go back to the beginning of the new era back in the culture of the Celts. At first the holiday was called Samhain. It was dedicated to honoring the dead and harvesting the harvest. Celebrations began on the eve of November 1st. It was a holiday typical of our Christmas, but with slightly different traditions and rituals. For a long time, this holiday absorbed many traditions and customs of holidays of the same nature from other peoples of Europe. These are the festivals of Felaria and the goddess Pomona, which were celebrated by the Romans. The holiday was adopted by the Germanic tribes, even before the migration of the Angles and Saxons to the British Isles. In those days, the jack-o-lantern had not yet become a staple of the holiday and was not yet invited to Halloween.

Together with the settlers, the holiday came to America. For the first time they began to grow pumpkins there. This is where this holiday brand came from - a jack-o'-lantern.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the holiday acquired its final name, and in Russian it sounds like Halloween.

Masquerade.

On the day of the holiday all over the world, where it is celebrated (and it has become truly international). On this day, it is customary to dress up in costumes of devils and witches and in such outfits walk through the streets in crowds with hollow pumpkins in their hands. Let's talk about pumpkins below. As the holiday acquired the image of “the domination of evil spirits,” many of the real rituals of the holiday were distorted. When the world lived in strictness and the short-term removal of the moral framework from people’s behavior, the desire to dress up as a demon on the night of the holiday and “rage” from the heart was understandable. Today, for the most part, the image of the supremacy of evil spirits among many people is based precisely on this motive in their souls. But for many people, this is a holiday in which they can drive away all fears and darkness. On this day, as a rule, a rich feast is arranged, which does not stop even at night and becomes a real master class of festivities.

Offerings.

Today, pagan myths of antiquity intersect in surprising and mysterious ways with the traditions of Christianity and modern pop culture.

It became common practice for everyone to give gifts. Otherwise, it was believed that if you don’t give to someone asking in the house, it could cause harm to the owner. And children, as a rule, take revenge on such people by smearing the walls and doors of houses where they do not serve dirt.

Fire from a pumpkin.

The jack-o'-lantern, or jack-o'-lantern as it became known. The fact is that the ripening of vegetables symbolizes the end of the harvest. Fire scares away evil spirits.

Together, pumpkin and fire became the main symbols of the holiday.
It is for this reason that the pumpkin lamp became a symbol of the holiday. How to make a pumpkin jack-o'-lantern for the holidays:

To make a holiday lantern (lamp), you need a good flat and plump pumpkin, a sharp knife, a tablespoon, a bowl for removing the core, a ballpoint pen and a candle and some kind of stand for the candle, two pieces of steel wire with a cross-section of 1 mm and a length of 50 cm.
Wash the pumpkin, then use the sharp end of a knife to cut off the top of the lid, clean both the lid and the inside of the pumpkin from the entire volume with a tablespoon of pulp, and then wipe the inside with a piece of bandage or just a rag to remove any remaining moisture.
Now you need to mark the surface of the pumpkin with a ballpoint pen: where you plan to make the cuts with a knife. In order for the pen to make a clear mark, the surface of the pumpkin must be dry.
Cut out the extra pieces according to the drawing.
This is what the finished pumpkin lantern will look like in working order. Now insert a candle into this lamp body through the hole inside. But before this, the candle also needs to be prepared.
We wind several turns of steel wire onto the candle, leaving tails of such length that at the installation site these tips fit into the pumpkin crust without piercing it. The tails should fit into the crust, forming a cross and so that the candle does not touch the pumpkin either from above or from below.
Beautiful lamps are obtained by applying a creative approach to manufacturing and a careful attitude to the creation process
And this is real art!

In the video collection you can see a real master class on the art of making such lamps and smile a little.