HALLOWEEN has many fathers, because harvests have been celebrated worldwide since the dawn of time. But when it comes to trick or treat with the jack o’ lantern, there is only one real origin. That one goes back to the Dutch city of Utrecht, and to the year 1516.
It was exactly one year before Luther nailed his angry complaints on a church door. He and Utrecht’s cathedral were both named after St. Martin. Many Utrechters shared Luther’s indignation about church abuse: their giant, very expensive cathedral had been built against most people’s wishes. But the Pope in Rome had promised donors an eternal life, and enough fat cats had forked over the funds.
IT WAS in the days when the large nave of the church had not yet collapsed during a hurricane. Between the free-standing tower and the church was a 12-ft wide walkway that would get you from one side of the church to the other. Regardless, the building cast a huge shadow. When it was dark, it was pitch dark.
Every year around late October, early November, harvest time was celebrated with children’s parades in town. At night, they’d go from door to door and ask for candy, trick or treat. By 1516 a sexton was living in a small apartment inside the belltower. He worried about those often unsupervised kids in the darkness, so he climbed up to the 100-ft tall top third of the tower, with its large openings known as a lantern, and lit a big chandelier with big candles, protected by glass panes, clearly visible from afar. As long as those candles were burning, the city could expect children to come trick-or-treating. Once they were put out, fun was over, and all kids had to go home.
BUT THAT was something children would rather decide among themselves. Round, hard sugar beet was a Dutch staple in the fields. They were cleaned out, dads, moms or the kids themselves carved a face in it, put a candle inside and bingo, now they had their own lantern that they took with them as they went on their candy hunt. Dutch kids have continued to do this for 500 years. Eventually, the officially designated day became November 11, but the name of the church that initially helped them still is what the procession is known as: St Martin.
A hundred years later, emigrants from Utrecht took their harvest festival tradition to America. There was no St. Martin’s Church, but there was another ceremony that was celebrated around the same time, All Saints’ Day, a week and a half earlier. They linked it to that, on the night before, October 31. All Hallows Eve, soon shortened to Halloween. Even today, nowhere is it more enthusiastically observed than in and around the New Utrecht Church in what is now Brooklyn but at the time was known as New Utrecht, back when those first immigrant kids came to Long Island, where they found no hard sugar beets, but nice soft, orange jack-o’-somethings instead.
It’s called pompoen, in Dutch. Neighborhood kids from other nationalities struggled to pronounce it. That’s how it became pumpkin.
* According to historians, the lantern of St. Martin’s Tower, that is, the top of Utrecht’s Dom Tower, looked like this, with the candles hanging there. This was before carillon bells were installed. As long as those candles were burning, Utrecht children were allowed to go trick or treat door to door on Halloween-Sint Maarten night.
