NEEP OF FAITH
DO YOU PLUMP FOR PUMPKINS OR TRADITIONAL LANTERNS?
GUISING. Dooking for apples. Damaging various kitchen implements while trying to hollow out a turnip to make a neep lantern, then carrying it around the neighbourhood. For Scots of a certain age, Halloween looks nothing like the bright orange and black pumpkin fiesta that the end of October has now become.
Nothing polarises the generations more than the neep versus pumpkin debate. The old school maintain that the turnip, once hollowed out, makes a creepier, more atmospheric lantern.
The younger ones, having watched US TV shows and films, think that trick or treating with a magnificent and easy to carve orange gourd is one of the best things we have imported from across the Pond.
What is not up for debate is that the first Jack o’lanterns, to give them their historical name, were carved from turnips in Scotland and Ireland in the 18th century.
They were made around Samhain, a festival celebrating the end of the Celtic year and the start of the new one.
Placed by the front door, their gruesome faces were meant to ward off the evil spirits said to roam around at this time of year. The early versions were lit by a piece of coal rather than a tea light from Ikea.
The migrants who crossed the Atlantic to make a new life in America took the tradition with them. Unable to find turnips in the New World, they used the plentiful pumpkin.
These had much to recommend them, being bigger, bolder and easier to carve than the dense and unforgiving neep.
For a while the two traditions diverged, with the Americans using October 31 as an excuse to show off their increasingly elaborate interior and exterior spooky décor.
They turned guising – visiting friends and neighbours to sing a song in exchange for an apple or a handful of nuts – into trick or treating.
This is a nastier, more materialistic version, where kids turn up at the door carrying a sack and demand that it be filled with goodies. If these are not forthcoming, the threat of a trick hangs heavily in the air.
Scotland began adopting the American model around the end of the last century.
Supermarkets began stocking carvable pumpkins. Garden centres sold illuminated ghosts and giant spider’s webs. Turnips went back to being sheep food or an accompaniment
The US vegetable may be easier to cut but when it comes to creepy carvings, homegrown turnips are all fright on the night – we look at the history of Halloween rituals and how they travelled to America and back
to haggis. American kids, raised on US Halloween, were alarmed when they discovered the more austere Scottish version.
Aidan and Lucca Mantho were nine and four when their parents moved to Glasgow.
Their mum Sara Pinto said: “My children were shocked when, on their first Halloween, they were required to do a jig, sing or recite a poiem in order to get an apple, a handful of nuts or a Curlywurly. Most houses were darkened and bolted.
“They still – 13 years later – mourn the nights of coming home with a pillow case bulging with loot, spending three hours on the kitchen floor counting and categorising then slipping into a candy coma.”
But despite our embrace of the pumpkin, the humble turnip lantern has been making a quiet comeback over the past few years as Scots reclaim their ancient traditions. Some people even use a drill bit to hollow them out.
When Rebecca McEwen and her husband Duncan started a pumpkin patch on Arnprior Farm near Stirling in 2016, some customers asked why there were no turnips available.
So they added a neep patch last year. Amazed children enjoy hauling the huge vegetables with mud-clotted curly roots and exuberant green leaves out of the ground.
Very few of them, however, want to take a knife to them.
But Elspeth Cherry has been carving neeps since she grew up in Glasgow in the 70s and still keeps the faith.
She and pumpkin enthusiast Duncan McEwan junior, who is nine, started making lanterns at the same time.
Elspeth struggled to hollow out a huge kettlebell of a turnip while Duncan managed to cut a lid and scoop out the seeds with little difficulty. He fashioned a spooky face using a dinky pumpkin carving kit without damaging himself in any way.
Elspeth, freezing and muddy, also got through the challenge without injury or breakages.
This, according to Rebecca McEwan, is very unusual. “I remember doing them when I was young. It was always break a spoon, cut a finger.”
Customers at the pumpkin patch looked on in amazement as Elspeth created a pagan icon out of something that might otherwise go into the soup. “
Pumpkins are glamorous and dramatic,” she said, “but neeps are dark and ancient. You can’t beat them for seasonal menace.”