One of the few positive things about the ongoing virus is that long stretches of "nothing much to do" have increased the number of carved Jack-o'-lanterns in our neighborhood appreciably. People, I theorize, are bored and thus take knife to pumpkin.

In the last few weeks, as the dog Virgil and I take our daily walk, we've been pleased to see dozens of Jack-o'-lanterns on porches throughout our part of New London.

This is welcome because the trend over the last decade had increasingly been for people to paint or draw faces on pumpkins, which is an insult to Samhain, the Celtic Festival of the Dead from which our Halloween traditions have evolved.

I'm not sure why or when people decided to stop scooping out pumpkin innards and then hand-slicing faces onto the shells that come to illumined life with a sparked candle, but it presumably had something to do with a philosophical line of thought that might be summarized as "That sure seems like a lot of work."

Hmm. Let's follow that line of reasoning for a moment.

1. Would you serve ground turkey burgers on Thanksgiving because preparing the traditional feast "seems like a lot of work"?

2. Would you light one match and pop a single balloon on the 4th of July to simulate the rockets' red glare because to otherwise assemble and ignite an armory-style stash of "Platoon"-style pyrotechnics "seems like a lot of work?"

3. And would you leave the yule log blazing in the Christmas Eve hearth — effectively turning Santa's trip down the chimney into a crematory disaster — because putting out the conflagration before bed and leaving the Jolly Fellow a cookie and a pint of winter lager "seems like a lot of work"?

"No" to the above.

To me, there is no finer holiday icon than a glowing Jack-o'-lantern, and as a child I just assumed God invented the pumpkin solely to serve Halloween. So, I was a taken aback when my father told me some history on Jack-o'-lanterns and how they came to be back in Ireland:

1. Originally, Jack-o'-lanterns were carved bananas. These proved to be too mushy, so early celebrants cycled through other options including carved grapes, carved ears of corn, carved green beans and, for some reason, a carved whole jaguar carcass — before the coconut was deemed acceptable.

2. Coconut-o'-lanterns, as they were called, WERE ideal. But importing the fruit to pre-Christian Ireland proved to be too expensive. Only then did someone suggest trying a pumpkin.

3. Jack-o'-lanterns were initially called Penelope-o'-lanterns because, at the first-ever pumpkin-carving party, the face on the winning gourd resembled, as one reveler observed, "my aunt Penelope."

4. Well, (Aunt) Penelope O'Riordan was already reeling from the previous December. She'd forgetten to extinguish her Christmas Eve fire, thereby turning Daidí na Nollag — the Celtic "Father Christmas" — into a holiday inferno as he tried to deliver presents. The whole village hated Penelope, and now she was about to be associated with another holiday in negative fashion. She sued over "Penelope-o'-lantern," and the court case was only resolved when the host of the pumpkin party, Jack Gallagher, offered his own name as a substituteand and all deemed that an acceptable solution.*

5. And that's how Gallagher-o'-lanterns came to be.

*O'Riordan v Gallagher Pumpkin Party [1126 B.C.] IESC 44, [2009] 3 IR 745