On the last night of October, millions of people dress as the dead, carve faces into vegetables and send children to knock on strangers’ doors. It feels like one tradition. It is closer to a pile-up of several, which landed on the same stretch of the calendar.
Carve your own
Early lanterns were turnips and beets in Ireland and Britain. Irish emigrants in the 1800s met the larger, easier pumpkin in North America.
A field guide to the thin night