Jo Walton (a Welsh SF/gaming author, now living in Canada) posted to her LJ about the differences between the Halloween she grew up with and the one her teenaged son now observes, mentioning that "[t]he light you lit against the night when I was a child was a swede, (a turnip, a rutabaga) not a pumpkin." To which another Brit replied: "The one American import I can really get behind is the pumpkin lantern - those turnips were bastards to carve."