Halloween

31 October 2026

Halloween is marked on 31 October, the evening before the Christian feast of All Saints. In 2026 it falls on a Saturday. The American version is mostly a secular evening of costumes, carved pumpkins and door-to-door requests for candy, and it is one of the country’s largest retail seasons of the year. Its symbols are older than the holiday: masks and costumes began as a way to ward off spirits.

Its ancestor is Samhain, a Celtic festival that marked the end of the harvest and the start of winter, the season when the boundary between the living and the dead was thought to be thinnest. In the 8th century the church set 1 November as All Saints’ Day, or All Hallows’ Day. The evening before became All Hallows’ Eve, which shortened into Halloween.

Irish and Scottish immigrants carried the customs to North America in the 19th century, and pumpkins replaced turnips, because pumpkins were native, larger and easier to carve. Trick-or-treating is younger than the holiday itself: it spread in the 1930s and 1940s, when towns organized supervised Halloween activities to cut down on vandalism, and became a national habit in the 1950s.

It is not a federal holiday and nobody gets the day off. It is a season. The National Retail Federation expects Americans to spend $13.5 billion on Halloween in 2026, after a record $13.1 billion in 2025. Costumes, decorations and candy make up most of that, and spending has risen even as shoppers complain about prices.

Pumpkins are the agricultural half of the picture. U.S. farms produced 1.44 billion pounds of pumpkins in 2024, and Illinois alone grew about 485 million pounds, roughly as much as the next four states combined. About 85 percent of pumpkin acreage goes to the fresh market, for carving and decorating, and about 15 percent to processing, for puree and pie filling (USDA).

Sources

• Library of Congress, American Folklife Center, “Halloween & Día de Muertos Resources”
• HISTORY, “Halloween: Origins, Meaning & Traditions”
• National Retail Federation, “Halloween Data and Trends”
• National Retail Federation, press release, 18 September 2025
• National Retail Federation, “NRF Halloween Survey Shows Consumer Spending Expected to Reach $13.5 Billion”
• USDA Economic Research Service, “Pumpkins: Background & Statistics”
• Timeanddate.com, “Holidays and Observances in the United States in 2026”

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