The Great Pumpkin Carving

Well as promised, here are a few pictures of my first attempt carving zapallo with my kids at Stephen Hawking. Overall I would classify this year’s attempt as a complete success! I think that the kids had fun and I enjoyed watching them stick their hands inside the zapallo and dig out the pulp, draw on an original face design, and cut it out piece by piece. I’ve really enjoyed sharing parts of our culture with the kids as I’ve taught them English this year. The point of this lesson was to learn six new verbs: to carve, to scoop, to put, to remove, to draw, and to light; and to learn the form of giving directions. We practiced the six steps to carving a pumpkin (zapallo) and then we put those steps into practice. I also took a few minutes to share with the kids the fable behind the Jack-O-Lantern. If you’ve never heard it, here it is for your reading pleasure (courtesy of Wikipedia):

A History of the Pumpkin
An Irish Fabel: One story says that Jack tricked the Devil into climbing an apple tree, and once he was up there Jack quickly placed crosses around the trunk or carved a cross into the bark, so that the Devil couldn't get down. In the myths, Jack only lets the Devil go when he agrees never to take his soul. After a while the thief died, as all living things do. Of course, his life had been too sinful for Jack to go to heaven; however, the Devil had promised not to take his soul, and so he was barred from hell as well. Jack now had nowhere to go. He asked how he would see where to go, as he had no light, and the Devil mockingly tossed him an ember that would never burn out from the flames of hell. Jack carved out one of his turnips (which was his favorite food), put the ember inside it, and began endlessly wandering the Earth for a resting place. He became known as "Jack of the Lantern", or Jack-o'-Lantern.

In America, the carved pumpkin was first associated with the harvest season in general, long before it became an emblem of Halloween.[5] The poet John Greenleaf Whittier, who was born in 1807, wrote "The Pumpkin" (1850):[6]

“Oh!—fruit loved of boyhood!—the old days recalling,
When wood-grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling!
When wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin,
Glaring out through the dark with a candle within!”