Make a Lantern
Design a face, print it as a stencil, and carve it with a grown-up.
A lantern in the window tells trick-or-treaters you’re in. Some people say it also tells anything else that’s out tonight that this house is awake. Design your face here, print it as a stencil, then tape it on and carve along the dots.
Design your face
The stencil prints on one sheet of A4, sized for an ordinary carving pumpkin. If yours is a small one, set the printer’s scale to about 70 per cent.
My lantern stencil
supanet.com/halloween
- Cut round the face, leaving a good margin, and tape it to the smoothest side of your pumpkin. Snip the edges of the paper so it lies flat against the curve.
- Push a cocktail stick through the paper along every dotted line, a dot about every half centimetre.
- Peel off the paper. The face is there in dots.
- A grown-up joins up the dots with a small serrated knife, middle shapes first, and pushes each piece out from the inside.
You’ll need
- A pumpkin with a flat bottom, so it doesn’t roll
- A big metal spoon or an ice-cream scoop
- A small serrated knife or a carving-kit saw, for the grown-up
- Your stencil, some masking tape and a cocktail stick
- Newspaper, because this gets messy
- A battery tea light
- A grown-up
How to carve it
- Take the lid off
A grown-up cuts a circle round the stalk, angling the knife in towards the middle so the lid sits on a ledge and can’t fall in. A little notch at the back shows which way it goes back on.
- Scoop it out
Pull out the seeds and stringy bits with your hands, then scrape the inside of the front with the spoon until it’s about as thick as your thumb. Thinner is easier to carve, and lets more light through.
- Tape on the stencil
Smooth it flat on the best side. Snip the edges of the paper if it creases round the curve.
- Prick the dots
Push the cocktail stick through the paper along every dotted line, then peel the paper off.
- Cut it out
The grown-up joins up the dots with small sawing movements, doing the middle shapes first, and pushes each piece out from the inside.
- Light it
Pop the tea light in, put the lid on and turn the big light off.
Before pumpkins
Long before anyone here had seen a pumpkin, children in Scotland and Ireland carved lanterns out of turnips. In Scotland they call them neeps. They carried them when they went guising, which means dressing up and going round the doors with a song or a poem or a joke to earn a treat. Anyone who has tried carving a turnip will tell you it’s like carving a brick. When families from Scotland and Ireland went to America they found pumpkins there, which are bigger and much softer, and the pumpkin lantern made its way back over here.
In Somerset they used mangelwurzels, big knobbly beets grown to feed cattle. In the village of Hinton St George, children still carry mangelwurzel lanterns called punkies round the village on the last Thursday in October, singing the song that begins:
It’s Punkie Night tonight
The story goes that, long ago, the men of the village went to the fair at Chiselborough and didn’t come home. Their wives hollowed out mangelwurzels, put candles in them and went out in the dark to look. When the men saw glowing faces coming towards them across the fields, they thought they were ghosts, and ran.
Don’t bin the seeds
Rinse off the stringy bits, dry the seeds on kitchen roll, toss them in a little oil and a pinch of salt, and roast them on a baking tray until they’re golden and crunchy. A grown-up will know how hot the oven should be.
For grown-ups: the knife is your job. A battery tea light is safer than a candle anywhere near curtains, costumes or small hands.