Wetaskiwin District Heritage Museum Centre & City of Wetaskiwin Archives

Happy Halloween, we hope that you have a safe night with just the right amount of spooking!! These three paper lanterns were donated to the Heritage Museum by June Hughes who used them as decorations in her classroom in the 1940s. June taught for close to 40 years in Wetaskiwin. The lanterns originally came from the general store of her parents William and Esther White of Greenshields Alberta. While today it is common for us to go to the store to buy Halloween decorations, before the 1940s most decorations were homemade. This makes our lanterns early examples of factory produced Halloween decorations!! Each lantern consists of three parts, a round card board base (not visible) on which a candle would be placed, the black card board frames, which were cut out Jack-O’-Lantern style, and thin coloured orange and green paper, through which the candle would glow.