Over here up north the seasons of the year are very different to each other. It’s not just the weather, it’s the light. In October the day gets several minutes shorter each day and before the snow arrives, with the typical heavy overcast skies, it can get really dark and gloomy. I call this the Mordor season. 

In the middle of the doom and gloom we have All Saints’ Day around the end of October/early November. In our tradition it’s candles, lanterns, graveyards but not the spooky stuff. It’s a downbeat quiet day remembering the dead.

We also have the Kekri. Kekri is over one thousand years old, a celebration marking the end of the harvest season. It’s food related festivities, ale, bonfires and sauna. Lots of weird stuff really. Also with lanterns, only ours were carved from turnips instead of pumpkins. Kekri, while used to be big, is not a widely celebrated thing here in Finland anymore, somewhat lost in history and merged with Christmas and New Year’s traditions over time. It’s not completely dead however and is being revived by a heritage foundation founded just for this purpose. 

Historically Halloween is not terribly different from all of the above, the origins are mostly the same, but it is different in how it is today, a commercialised carnival of spook and gore. For us Halloween is a recent import, we didn't have it when I was a kid. Familiar through popular culture but not an event locally. In the past maybe thirty years or so Halloween has managed to gain a place in our calendars and today we embrace it as if it had always been here.

At the end of the day this all makes the diminishing daylight of October and November a little easier to bear.

Over the years I have made some photographs that fit the Halloween season. For me the obvious step was to expand Halloween to the Intergalactic space, namely the Hoth system in the galaxy far, far away. There is something in the idea of a lonely place with a dash of supernatural horror. A classic setup really, thinking about John Carpenter’s The Thing et al.

Such a setup needs special pumpkins and I made them out of white hobby clay. In white it looks like they were made of snow and that is just perfect for my photographs.

The original snow Jack-o’-lanterns. I've used these in most of these photographs. This one with the old style Snowtrooper helmet. I changed for the new design shortly after this one from 2017.

The fun thing about the white Jack-o’-lanterns and lighting them is that they remind me of the snow lanterns we actually make here in winter time. They cast a similar warm glow in the blue hour of near dark.

The snow lantern. I’ve built dozens and dozens of these IRL over the years, just snowballs and a candle, and I still love them.
The Ultimate Winter Wonderland. I have made two sets of snow pumpkins, big and small, and for this I used them both.

In addition to the snow theme I made some small pumpkins out of orange and green hobby clay too. They look nice but are not nearly as tongue-in-cheeck as the snow ones.

There was a brief sidestep to a certain forest moon with the Halloween theme but I’ve not made much more of these as the orange Jack-o’-lantern is actually quite close to the Lego one and as such do not add much to the concept.

So, my pumpkins are mostly white like snow. But for some extra weird I tried to make Jack-o’-lanterns out of ice as well. Obviously not ice of course but clear epoxy resin. Unfortunately the brand I’ve used turns yellow over time. The pumpkins I made last year are now unusable. I have the silicone molds though, so maybe if I run into non-yellowing clear resin I might make some more and try again.

The ice lanterns. Lighting these with warm/cool colour scheme did not look as nice as it does with the snow versions so I removed warm tones from this one.
Most of the pumpkins I’ve made. The orange ones seemed too normal, I haven’t photographed them much. In the middle the clear resin pumpkins, now badly yellowed and unusable as such. I have the molds, so I can easily make more. The white snow pumpkins in two sizes, my favourites. These are the ones I used for making silicon casts for the clear resin ones thus they are duplicates of some of the white ones.

The header image is from a couple of weeks ago, the most recent one of this concept. I always try to make each of my photographs a little different to keep it interesting. For this I brought in some Lego bones and skeletons to add classic horror elements to it.

Happy Halloween!

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Tags: halloween, hoth, inspirations, Lego, Star Wars, tk-24/7