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The majority of this collection - which belongs to Sue Jackson - is that of the old lanterns, which includes the more well known "jack-O'-lanterns" and Sue's favorite, the "cat lanterns". This collection is displayed all year in an old, 1800's, stepback cupboard. One of Sue's favorite reason for collecting these vintage Halloween items is the history and the fact that they survived all of these years. "It always makes me wonder where these jack-o'-lanterns came from and how they were used and by whom", she says.

So, the story goes that the jack-o'-lanterns came about in the late 1800's to the early 1900's. cupboard full of lanterns During the harvest time, people, mainly farmers, made decorative "lanterns" out of turnips or other fruits and vegetables and hung them outside of their houses. It is believed this custom came out of Ireland and Scotland when they would put these vegetable lanterns on the roadway to guide their friends to the harvest festival. They, supposedly, were the one's that named these vegetable lanterns, "Jack of the Lantern" from a legend about a man named Jack. When he died, his soul could not enter Hell because Jack had played jokes on the Devil. Jack's ghost was forced to wander around carrying his turnip lantern until Judgment Day. When immigrants came to this country, they substituted the American pumpkin for the carved turnip and it was appropriately named, "Jack-O'-Lantern".

Many of the early Jack-o'-lanterns came from not only America, but Germany as well. They were primarily made from composition or pressed paper that sort of resembled plaster of Paris. They had the cut-outs for the eyes, nose, and mouth and had very thin colored paper placed on the inside to back up these cut outs. cat lanternsBecause the colored paper was so fragile, it is rare to find a jack-o'-lantern today with the paper still intact. Around the 1920's, the composition paper was replaced with more of a pressed and formed paperboard and a die cut flat paperboard. This was a sturdier material to work with. In the 1930's you found paper mache being the material of choice for the construction of these jack-o'-lanterns, and by the time the good ol' fifties rolled around out came the plastic!