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Carving out a niche for pumpkins

No hiding the fact, almost all the information in this column on pumpkins in folklore and pictures came off the internet. I am grateful for the sources.

Cinderella would never have met her prince without the pumpkin-turned carriage.

Almost as well-known, I suspect, is Linus’s waiting year after year in the pumpkin patch for the Great Pumpkin. I’m told it still airs close to this time on our TV sets.

R. L. Stine has fun turning two boys into “big hungry werewolves” after they concoct “Pumpkin Juice” from an old recipe. Time to reverse the effects when one tries to eat his dog Scout. They learn the only way to reverse the spell is to drink more juice BUT it has to be made from the very same pumpkin. Only Mom has used the juice to make a pie. She then comments how much she enjoyed drinking the rest of their juice — as she becomes increasingly ravenous.

Perhaps a similar juice was enjoyed at Hogwarts by Harry Potter and his friends. I copied two recipes, one more complicated than the other, but could find no agreement on even whether it was best chilled or served warm. It features in many of the Potter series.

More seasonal perhaps is Ichabod Crane and “The Legend of the Headless Horseman” by Washington Irving. Lean, lanky and supremely superstitious, the young schoolmaster vies for the love of Katrina Van Tassel. Rejected, Ichabod rides home through the woods “heavy-hearted and crest fallen.” Galloping through a “menacing swamp” he is unsettled by a cloaked rider’s eerie size and silence. His head lies on his saddle. Ichabod rides for his life.

For years I had access to many of the Frank Baum Oz stories but don’t believe I ever took advantage of that. Jack Pumpkinhead first appears in “The Marvelous Land of Oz,” the second of the series. “The seeds and other pumpkin guts” were left to substitute for his brain.

The Oz books did not die with Baum. In fact, Ruth Plumly Thompson gives Jack the starring role in the 23rd, “Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz.” When a youthful traveling companion combats darkness by placing a lighted candle in Jack’s empty head, Jack exclaims that he now feels “brighter” though also “a little light-headed.”

Which brings us to “Feathertop: A Moralized Legend” by Nathaniel Hawthorne which is quite long and complicated. To attempt to condense, Mother Rigby is asking for a magical lighting of her pipe as the story opens. “One of the cunning and potent witches in New England,” she was beginning to make a scarecrow to frighten off the crows and blackbirds that had already discovered her garden. In a rare and uncommon moment of pleasantness, she was “resolved to produce something fine, beautiful and splendid, rather than the hideous and horrible.”

Feeling her scarecrow too good then to be stuck in a corn-patch, Mother Rigby (“a witch of singular power and dexterity”) places her pipe in the scarecrow’s mouth, bidding him to puff. No great surprise, the scarecrow does so and, with each ensuing puff, he becomes more real with an excellent vocabulary.

“The shrivelled, yellow face, which heretofore had been no face at all, had already a thin, fantastic haze, as it were of human likeness, shifting to and fro across it; sometimes vanishing entirely, but growing more perceptible than ever with the next whiff from the pipe.” Only trick is he must continue to smoke the pipe.

Hawthorne devotes a lengthy but wonderful paragraph to the attire that does in this case truly make the man. Impressing the people he passes on the street, Feathertop continues to the home of Justice Gookin, said gentleman the father of “Pretty Polly Gookin, “a damsel of a soft, round figure, with light hair and blue eyes.”

Justice Gookin catches on at once to the demonic figure, “gestures of diabolical merriment” dancing around his pipe. Apparently more frightened of Mother Rigby than concerned for his daughter, he leaves the two alone.

“The stranger it is true was evidently a thorough and practised man of the world, systematic and self-possessed, and therefore the sort of a person to whom a parent ought not to confide a simple, young girl without due watchfulness for the result.” Polly, lacking such watchfulness, quickly falls in love.

There happened to be a magic mirror in the parlor. “No sooner did the images therein reflected meet Polly’s eyes than she shrieked, shrank from the stranger’s side, gazed at him for a moment in the wildest dismay, and sank insensible upon the floor. Feathertop likewise had looked toward the mirror. and there beheld, not the glittering mockery of his outside show, but a picture of the sordid patchwork of his real composition stripped of all witchcraft.”

“‘I’ve seen myself, mother! I’ve seen myself for the wretched, ragged, empty thing I am! I’ll exist no longer!’

“Snatching the pipe from his mouth, he flung it with all his might against the chimney, and at the same instant sank upon the floor, a medley of straw and tattered garments . . . and a shrivelled pumpkin in the midst.”

Happy reading this Halloween.

Susan Crossett has lived outside Cassadaga for more than 20 years. A lifetime of writing led to these columns as well as two novels. Her Reason for Being was published in 2008 with Love in Three Acts following in 2014. Information on all the Musings, her books and the author may be found at Susancrossett.com. She may also be reached at musingsfromthehill@gmail.com.

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