It's a little more than that : American Halloween is aspirational British Halloween - if not for the kids who read Harry Potter, but I think definitely for JK Rowling's generation.
When you have tried to make a jack-o-lantern out of a swede, or, heaven help us, a traditional potato or turnip, as we did when I was a kid in the 70's, pumpkins become a luxury good. They are huge! They are brightly coloured! You can easily scoop out the insides with a spoon (no hacking away with a sharp knife and cutting your fingers or accidentally making a hole). Magic! Until, oooh, the mid-80s they were quite hard to get hold of too - if you were the local child whose parents had secured a pumpkin, that was something of a coup. And American Halloween - it's safe, it's friendly, it's dressing up and going out with your friends. It is not (from a British perspective) genuinely scary or upsetting or dangerous.
A Harry Potter where the wizarding world was entirely based on British Halloween traditions would be a very different and much darker place, I think - probably not the kind of place Harry would see as an amazing alternative to his miserable Muggle existence.
I don't really have a problem with Harry Potter pumpkins: they don't seem to behave or taste like our Muggle pumpkins, so I'd assumed some enterprising wizard - perhaps a Herbology specialist, we know they have botanical sciences - had developed a range of magical pumpkins with amazing new flavours and nutritional qualities. Similar to what Muggles have done with the tomato, only with magic to take it much further.
I doubt Draco or Lucius have to do anything hand-on to do with actual agriculture, any more than a Muggle aristocrat would, but that doesn't mean they don't have people working for them. Perhaps they have self-managing magical market gardens, or employed magician gardener/farmers? Although we mostly meet professional wizards, there are others about - staff for the Knight Bus, for example, and the lady that pushes the trolly on the Hogwarts Express.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2012-08-31 10:40 am (UTC)When you have tried to make a jack-o-lantern out of a swede, or, heaven help us, a traditional potato or turnip, as we did when I was a kid in the 70's, pumpkins become a luxury good. They are huge! They are brightly coloured! You can easily scoop out the insides with a spoon (no hacking away with a sharp knife and cutting your fingers or accidentally making a hole). Magic! Until, oooh, the mid-80s they were quite hard to get hold of too - if you were the local child whose parents had secured a pumpkin, that was something of a coup. And American Halloween - it's safe, it's friendly, it's dressing up and going out with your friends. It is not (from a British perspective) genuinely scary or upsetting or dangerous.
A Harry Potter where the wizarding world was entirely based on British Halloween traditions would be a very different and much darker place, I think - probably not the kind of place Harry would see as an amazing alternative to his miserable Muggle existence.
I don't really have a problem with Harry Potter pumpkins: they don't seem to behave or taste like our Muggle pumpkins, so I'd assumed some enterprising wizard - perhaps a Herbology specialist, we know they have botanical sciences - had developed a range of magical pumpkins with amazing new flavours and nutritional qualities. Similar to what Muggles have done with the tomato, only with magic to take it much further.
I doubt Draco or Lucius have to do anything hand-on to do with actual agriculture, any more than a Muggle aristocrat would, but that doesn't mean they don't have people working for them. Perhaps they have self-managing magical market gardens, or employed magician gardener/farmers? Although we mostly meet professional wizards, there are others about - staff for the Knight Bus, for example, and the lady that pushes the trolly on the Hogwarts Express.