How Many Days Until Halloween?

Halloween is October 31, and it is one of those holidays that people start preparing for weeks in advance. The costumes, the decorations, the haunted houses, the candy. Americans spend roughly $12 billion on Halloween each year, making it the second most comercially successful holiday after Christmas.

The holiday has its roots in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, celebrated about 2,000 years ago in what is now Ireland, the UK and northern France. The Celts believed that on the night of October 31, the boundary between the living and the dead became thin, and ghosts returned to earth.

🎃 History of Halloween

🎃 How Did Halloween Start?

People would light bonfires and wear costumes (usually animal skins) to ward off roaming spirits. When the Romans conquered Celtic territory, they blended Samhain with their own festivals. One was Feralia, a day to honor the dead, and another honored Pomona, the goddess of fruit and trees. Pomonas symbol is the apple, which is probably where bobbing for apples comes from.

🇺🇸 How Did Halloween Come to America?

Halloween was not widely celebrated in early colonial America because the Puritan settlers rejected it as pagan. It gained popularity in the mid-1800s as Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine brought their traditions with them. Trick-or-treating in its modern form started in the 1930s and 1940s. The "trick" part used to be more serious, in the early 1900s, Halloween was associated with genuine vandalism. Communities promoted trick-or-treating as a way to channel the mischief into something safer.

📊 Halloween by the Numbers

About 69% of Americans plan to celebrate Halloween. Pet costumes have become a $700 million industry, with pumpkin costumes being the top choice for dogs. Candy corn is the most divisive Halloween candy: about 9 billion pieces are produced each year, and surveys show people either love it or hate it with very little middle ground.

🍬 How Much Candy Do Trick-or-Treaters Collect?

The average trick-or-treater visits 20 to 30 houses and collects about 3,500 to 7,000 calories worth of candy. Most parents report "inspecting" (and eating) a significant portion of their childrens haul. Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, Snickers and M&Ms consistently rank as the most popular trick-or-treat candies.

🎃 The Jack-o-Lantern Was Originally a Turnip

Irish immigrants brought the tradition of carving faces into vegetables to America, but in Ireland they used turnips, not pumpkins. Turnip carving is much harder (the flesh is dense and fibrous), which is why the switch to pumpkins, which are native to North America, was such a relief. If you have ever tried to carve a turnip, you understand why Americans never looked back.