North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Lori Rizzo" <larizzo@charter.net>]

First, you know you are a garden addict when you go to cut your beautiful French heirloom pumpkin into a Jack O’Lantern, take a look at the smooth deep flesh, and immediately chop it up and throw it in the oven to bake…so much for the display!...and

OK – a bit late, but I couldn’t help smiling at the 4^th “Halloween tradition” on the list from The Onion.com:

 

Halloween Origins

Every Oct. 31, children dress in a variety of popular costumes and go door-to-door collecting candy. Here's where that Halloween tradition, and several others, came from:

·                Haunted Houses are based on Victorian England's "Scare Manors," places where children who didn't mine enough coal were sent as punishment

·                Giving children candy at the door began when early American settlers realized it was a lot easier than talking to kids about the meaning of death

·                Much like people today, pre-Christian pagans would throw toilet parchment all over the tree outside their mean alchemy teacher's house.

·                Jack-o'-lanterns first debuted in 1981 as part of a marketing scheme to promote Monsanto's invention of the pumpkin

·                The song "Monster Mash" borrows its melody from a medieval Gregorian All Saints' Day chant entitled "I Worketh In The Abbey Into The Darkness One Night (O Monster Of Salvation)"

·                Bobbing for apples was originated at a Halloween party by a group of people who were patronizing an armless friend

·                In 1928, Nathaniel Darder of Worcester was the first guy to give out treats in a strategically loosened bathrobe

·                According to modern-day Wiccans, most of today's Halloween traditions are actually blah, blah, blah

 

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