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The carved pumpkin, lit by a candle inside, is only of Halloween's most prominent symbols in America, and is commonly called a jack-o'-lantern. Inchoate in Europe, these lanterns were first carved from a turnip or rutabaga. Believing that the head was the most powerful part of the figure containing the spirit and the knowledge, the Celts used the "head" of the vegetable to frighten off any superstitions. The name jack-o'-lantern can be traced abaft to the Irish legend of Stingy Jack, a greedy, gambling, hard-drinking broken down farmer. He tricked the devil into climbing a tree and trapped him by carving a cross into the tree trunk. In revenge, the devil placed a curse on Jack, condemning him to forever wander the globe at nighttide with the only light he had: a candle inside of a hollowed turnip.
It is not Halloween Costume always easy to track the development of Halloween in Ireland and Scotland from the mid-seventeenth century, largely because singular bum to trace ritual practices from [modern] folkloric evidence that do not necessarily reflect how the holiday might have changed; these rituals may not be "authentic" or "timeless" examples of pre-industrial times.