Tomorrow we celebrate Halloween, a holiday with origins dating back to the ancient Celts. Today it’s the second biggest consumer spending holiday in America. In all the frenzy of make-believe horror, there is one constant…

Consider the pumpkin. Long before Charles M. Schultz imagined Linus waiting all night in a field for the arrival of the ‘Great Pumpkin’, American poet, Carl Sandburg wrote his ‘ode’ to a simpler time and celebration.

Theme in Yellow

I spot the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters
And I am called pumpkins.
On the last of October
When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost songs
And love to the harvest moon;
I am a jack-o’-lantern
With terrible teeth
And the children know
I am fooling.

Carl Sandburg ‘Chicago Poems’ 1916