The Bell Lap: Spirit O’ the Lantern

A lot of people claim that Halloween is their favorite holiday. They think it’s about dressing up like sick sluts, getting blackout, and eating so much candy that their stool reflects all the hues of the Skittles rainbow.

But that’s what every other day of the year is about. The true Halloween is about postponing the pleasure of eating your candy to count it for the purposes of a math project. It’s about a young bro named Cornelius who once broke his middle school’s record for UNICEF collections by solemnly refusing to accept candy without a charitable donation. But most of all, it’s about three little words that epitomize the spirit of the holiday: [the] jack o’ lantern.

During our Harvard run, we’ve experienced a different Halloween than the one we grew we grew up with. A Halloween more about the “trick” than the “treat.” Feeling cheapened by this “Shalloween” alternative, we braved the downpours of Saturday afternoon to recapture the substance of the holiday: that meaty, orange pulp found in the perfect pumpkin.

With our friends Stollichnaya and Cheddar Ted, we hit up Boston Common for the Life is good® Pumpkin Festival 2005. The goal was to set the Guinness world record for most lit jack o’ lanterns in one place (28,925!), but also to raise awareness and funds for Camp Sunshine, a retreat for children with life-threatening illnesses and their families. The event perfectly combined our two favorite pastimes: Being creepy and “giving back.”

With pumpkins lined up as far as the eye could see, Boston looked like a death row for renegade jack o’ lanterns. We could barely make out the muffled voice of some sicko whispering, “Excuse me, Mr. O’Lantern, you have been found guilty of premeditated homicide of a young child and are hereby sentenced to death by incineration.”

Before we knew it, we were holding complimentary blow torches and lighting up jackos with more gusto than Donald Sutherland in Backdraft. Meanwhile, youths attempted to set fire to their siblings beneath the 40-foot Pyramid of Pumpkins, a towering inferno of burning jackos that, had it fallen, would have taken out the lion’s share of the families in attendance.

But the real nucleus of the festival was the “Carving Tent,” where children hacked at pumpkins like Michael Myers and soccer moms etched their frustration into the tough velum of the lantern. Fifty-year-old men with mustaches festered in the shadows, eyeing the pumpkins lustily. Cheddar Ted argued with a volunteer about how to produce “the opposite of a question mark.”

Amid this mayhem, something had eluded us. Even though we had lit literally hundreds of jack o’ lanterns in the pouring rain and taken some mad creepy photos, we felt that same emptiness that often results from eating an entire bag of candy corn.

Just then, we spotted Stollichnaya whiling away at a particularly massive pumpkin. Totally enraptured by the task at hand, he stood silent, solemnly committed to carving the most profound pumpkin of all. Shaking off requests to give us a “hint” of what he was carving, he finally poked out the last pumpkin piece, slowly lifted the lantern in the air, and mouthed the single syllable—“LIFE”—that he had etched across in perfect block letters. The jack o’ lantern’s flame spontaneously burst forth from the wick as if lit by an invisible presence. With this simple gesture, Stollichnaya had combined the spirit of Halloween and Camp Sunshine. If there were a Guinness record for heart, he probably would have broken it.

Deciding to burn the lantern at both ends, we returned to the Common under the cloak of nightfall, only to find a chain gang of burly men tossing the leftover jackos into the back of a flatbed truck, like gypsies pursuing the remains of the dead. But as painful as the sight was, we knew somehow that Halloween would live on.

And for that, we thank brave Stollichnaya.