Halloween

Once again, I carved papaya jack-o-lanterns for Halloween this year. It's my favorite part of the holiday.

I managed to spread it out over a few days, and got several other people to join in and help.

They turned out great as always. I've become more of a crafty than an artsy person, so most of my designs are pretty basic.

I kinda like them better without eyebrows or noses, actually. Gives them a kinda creepy skull-like appearance. Very appropriate.

Along with the hanai nephews, we carved up a bunch on Halloween-eve and put them on the mailbox, out by the road.

One actually went inside the mailbox. Since there weren't any fire hazards nearby, I left them out there all night. The next day, the mailman pulled into the driveway and gently reminded me that he couldn't deliver the mail with papayas in the box.


My friend and roommate S. says he actually saw he saw a sign reading "Aloha-ween" at a local school. It's pretty common everywhere, I guess, to see those kinds of signs around major holidays, often involving bad puns.

From a linguistic perspective, it's interesting that people choose "-ween" as a suffix for these playful compounds. The original morphology comes from "(all) Hallow's eve", and the phonological changes are fairly straightforward: the /s/ phoneme was deleted, and /v/ -> /n/. I'm not sure why a fricative would have changed to a nasal actually, that's a little odd.

Anyway, going by the original morphology, people should choose, say, "Aloha-een", since the /w/ belonged to the "hallow" morpheme. But human languages usually prefer the CV syllable structure, so we use epenthesis to "fix" them. Basically, it just "sounds better" to have a consonant in there.


Several of my jack-o-lanterns were made possible through the kind donations of others.


The three you see to the right were made possible by a grant from Hilo Sharks Coffee. For those of you who aren't familiar with them, the angry little guy on the far right isn't a pumpkin, it's a kabocha, a winter squash.

You might also notice the brilliant crenellation-kinda-things on the lid of the center one. That one was carved by Jill, who went to art school.


I also carved several pineapple jack-o-lanterns. They turned out much better than I expected. You can see one in the pics up at the top of the page, and two others to the right here. All these pineapples were generously provided by my friends at Kaiwiki Farms. They grow organic white pineapples, easily the best pineapples I've ever eaten.

If you're thinking about carving a pineapple jack-o-lantern yourself, here's a few pointers:

• The trickiest part about hollowing a pineapple is the woody core. Generally, my technique was to cut off the top, then slash around inside with a knife, and scoop out the resulting pulp.
  
• You'll probably have a hard time removing the last little bit of the core when you get down to the bottom. It's just an awkward angle for a knife. Wait until you carve the face, then go in through the mouth to level out a spot for the candle.
• You don't really need a vent hole at the top like you do with papayas. These guys are so tall, the eye holes work pretty well to let the smoke and heat out.
  
• These things only last one or two days. After that they'll be totally swarming with fruit flies.
  

Finally, I spent the end of Halloween over at a friend's house playing Japanese Mahjong. At one point, I had a pretty good hand going. I was 2 tiles from having it when Shinsuke started muttering "sugoi!" under his breath. His hand was worth 84,000 points, and pretty much ended the game. Still, fun times.

I carved one last papaya lantern while playing, but forgot to take a picture.