Halloween by the numbers: 15 facts behind the holiday

The jack-o'-lantern did not begin as a pumpkin. It began as a carved turnip in Ireland and Scotland. It turned orange and round only because pumpkins grew everywhere in North America, where Irish and Scottish immigrants settled. Trick-or-treating is often described as an ancient custom, but its current form is barely a century old. It was nearly stalled in its infancy by wartime sugar rationing. Candy corn was already on sale in the 1880s, before most American homes had electric light. None of this is trivia for its own sake. Each detail explains something visible on an American street every October 31, from the shape of the pumpkin on the porch to the bowl of wrapped miniatures by the door.

Halloween sits at an unusual intersection of folklore, immigration history, agriculture and retail. Its oldest threads run back to Samhain, a Gaelic festival marking the end of the harvest and the start of winter. Those customs crossed the Atlantic with 19th-century immigrants. They mixed with English, German and Christian observances already practiced in American communities, then were rebuilt almost beyond recognition by 20th-century consumer culture. The holiday now anchors one of the largest seasonal retail stretches on the U.S. calendar, trailing only the winter holidays in spending on decorations.

These 15 Halloween facts trace where specific traditions started and how they changed as they crossed the ocean. They also separate the documented record from the widely repeated claims that sit closer to legend. The list covers the real candy corn origin story and the practical reason pumpkins displaced turnips. It explains how a children's charity turned a night of candy collection into a fundraising campaign in 1950. It also covers why a full moon on October 31 is genuinely rare, and why the poisoned-candy scare that still shapes safety advice has almost no documented basis. Together they give a clearer account of how Americans celebrate Halloween, and of how a Celtic harvest festival became one of the most distinctly American holidays on the calendar.

Illustration: Quartz

"Halloween" is a contraction of "All Hallows' Eve," the night before All Hallows' Day. That feast is now more commonly called All Saints' Day, and the Christian calendar fixes it to November 1. "Hallow" is an older English word for a saint or holy person. The phrase compressed in everyday speech to "Hallowe'en," and then to the single word in use today.

The date was not chosen at random. Pope Gregory III set All Saints' Day on November 1 in the eighth century. The church calendar landed on a stretch of the year when autumn festivals were already observed across the British Isles. That overlap is why the holiday carries two sets of threads at once. The name points to a Catholic feast. Much of the surrounding custom points further back than the feast itself.

Because All Saints' Day falls on November 1 without exception, Halloween sits permanently on October 31. It does not move the way Easter does. Easter depends on a lunar calculation and can land anywhere across a span of more than a month. A fixed date has made it simple for schools, municipalities and retailers to build annual routines around the night, from fall festivals to the start of the seasonal shopping calendar.

The apostrophe in "Hallowe'en" marked a dropped "v" in "even," an archaic word for evening. The longer older form was "All Hallow Even." That spelling stayed standard in English-language publishing well into the 20th century, and the unpunctuated version became dominant in American usage by the middle of that century. Some British and Irish publications kept the older form considerably longer.

"Trick-or-treat" is a separate and far newer American coinage with no tie to the religious origin of the holiday's name. It describes an activity rather than the night itself. The phrase did not reach common usage until the 1930s, by which point "Halloween" had been standard English for generations.

Illustration: Quartz

Halloween's oldest customs descend from Samhain, a Gaelic festival that marked the end of the harvest and the start of winter in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man roughly 2,000 years ago. It fell at the midpoint between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice, a hinge point in the farming year.

Gaelic communities treated that seasonal threshold as a moment when the boundary between the living and the dead grew thin and spirits could cross it. People lit communal bonfires, left out food offerings and sometimes moved about in disguises made from animal skins, both to honor the dead and to avoid being recognized by whatever was wandering. The masking is the clearest ancestor of the modern Halloween costume.

The festival carried plain agricultural logic as well. Livestock came down from summer pastures, the last crops were gathered ahead of the first hard frost, and households measured their stores against the months before spring. Religious observance and winter preparation were a single event.

Samhain customs crossed the Atlantic with Irish and Scottish immigrants during the 19th century, who arrived in large numbers after the Irish famine of the 1840s. In American towns those traditions met English and German harvest practices and the Christian observances of All Saints' and All Souls' days. The strands fused into a holiday that resembled none of its sources exactly.

The blend took decades to spread beyond the communities that carried it. Through the late 1800s, Halloween remained a regional and largely ethnic observance in much of the U.S., more common in neighborhoods with heavy Irish and Scottish settlement than in the country at large.

By the early 20th century the holiday had a recognizably modern shape, built on costumes, house-to-house visiting and organized community events. The bonfires mostly vanished in the move to American streets. The masking, the autumn timing and the link to the dead survived the crossing.

Illustration: Quartz

Door-to-door trick-or-treating in its current form dates only to the 1930s in the U.S., and it did not become a near-universal childhood ritual until after World War II. Sugar rationing during the war stalled the custom almost as soon as it had started, and it spread nationwide across the late 1940s and 1950s.

The holiday looked different before that. Halloween in American towns through the first decades of the 20th century centered on pranks and property damage — soaped and waxed windows, gates lifted off their hinges, overturned outhouses, chimneys stuffed with debris — carried out mostly by boys and young men. Civic groups, newspapers and parent organizations in the 1920s and 1930s promoted organized alternatives, including parties and house-to-house treat exchanges, to channel that mischief into something supervised.

The phrase itself turns up in North American print in the early 1930s, understood as a literal bargain: hand over a treat, or accept the risk of a trick. The transaction framing mattered. Children got a script, and adults got an inexpensive way to buy quiet on their own front steps.

Postwar conditions did the rest. The baby boom produced an enormous cohort of children, and new suburban subdivisions put hundreds of front doors within walking distance of one another on lit streets. Together those factors made the custom workable at a scale it never had in scattered rural areas or dense city neighborhoods.

Mass media fixed it in place. Disney $DIS released the animated short "Trick or Treat" in 1952, with Donald Duck's nephews working the neighborhood, and the phrase circulated through radio, television and print in the same years. Candy manufacturers moved at the same moment, shifting from loose candy sold by weight to small, individually wrapped pieces meant to be handed out one at a time. That packaging decision, made to serve trick-or-treating, still shapes what Halloween candy looks like on a store shelf.

Illustration: Quartz

Candy corn is older than the trick-or-treating tradition it now decorates. It was created in the 1880s, most often credited to George Renninger of the Wunderle Candy Company in Philadelphia, and it reached the market as a novelty called chicken feed rather than as a Halloween product.

That name made sense to the customers it was aimed at. Much of the American population still farmed or lived within sight of farms, and confectioners of the period turned out candies shaped like agricultural staples — kernels, clover and other field imagery a buyer would recognize at once. The three-tone design, white at the pointed tip, orange through the middle and yellow at the wide base, was built to read as a corn kernel from across a shop counter.

The Goelitz Confectionery Company, known today as the Jelly Belly Candy Company, began making candy corn around 1900 and stayed one of the names most closely tied to it through the 20th century. The process was labor-intensive at first. Workers poured hot sugar syrup by hand into kernel-shaped impressions pressed in trays of cornstarch, returning for a second and third pass to lay down each color stripe.

The Halloween link came much later. Candy corn attached itself to October once the holiday's visual identity settled around harvest imagery, pumpkins and an orange-and-yellow autumn palette the candy already matched. Nothing in its original recipe or marketing was seasonal.

It now occupies odd territory in the American candy aisle, landing on both best-loved and worst-of lists in the consumer preference surveys published each fall. The pattern is less a contradiction than a reflection of what the candy does. It is cheap, it keeps for months and it functions as shorthand for the season, which keeps it in bowls regardless of how many people actually eat it.

Production follows the same narrow calendar. Most of the year's supply is manufactured and shipped in the weeks around Halloween, a sharp contrast to chocolate bars that sell at a steady clip all year.

Illustration: Quartz

Pumpkins displaced turnips for a practical reason, not a symbolic one. They grew in abundance across North America and were far easier to hollow out. Irish and Scottish immigrants brought a carving custom built around turnips when they arrived in the 19th century. They found a bigger, softer crop already filling the fields around them, and the tradition moved over to it.

The custom traces to a folk tale about Stingy Jack, a man who outwitted the devil and was condemned to wander with only a burning coal for light. He carried the coal inside a hollowed vegetable. Households across Ireland and Scotland carved grim faces into turnips, potatoes and beets. They set the lanterns in windows and beside doorways to keep Jack's restless spirit and other unwanted visitors away.

A turnip resists the knife. Its flesh is dense and its cavity small, which caps both the size of the lantern and the detail of the face. A pumpkin arrives large, soft-fleshed and already hollow in the middle. Farmers in the U.S. and Canada were growing it in quantity. The folklore survived intact while the raw material changed.

American newspapers and magazines were describing pumpkin carving for Halloween by the late 1800s. That was the same stretch when the holiday shifted from a regional immigrant observance toward a national one.

The split between carving pumpkins and pie pumpkins is a real agricultural distinction. The big, smooth field pumpkins sold for jack-o'-lanterns come from cultivars bred for size, uniform shape and a roomy cavity. Their flesh is watery and bland. Canned pumpkin and pie filling come from smaller, denser varieties selected for flavor and texture.

Production stays concentrated in a handful of states. Illinois ranks as the leading pumpkin producer by volume, driven largely by its processing plants for canned pumpkin. Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and California supply much of what reaches store displays and roadside stands for carving each fall.

Illustration: Quartz

The heaviest pumpkins ever grown weigh more than 2,700 pounds, and none of them are suitable for carving or eating. Record-setters all come from one cultivar, Atlantic Giant, bred for sheer mass rather than flavor, wall thickness or the round shape a jack-o'-lantern needs.

Weigh-offs run each fall at agricultural fairs across North America, with competitive growers in states including New York, Wisconsin and California, plus entrants from Canada and Europe. The Great Pumpkin Commonwealth writes the rules for sanctioned contests and keeps the official records, requiring certified scales and an inspection that disqualifies any fruit with a hole or a crack through the shell.

Growing at that scale bears little resemblance to ordinary vegetable gardening. Competitors prune the vines so a single fruit takes everything the plant produces, amend the soil heavily, run dedicated irrigation lines, and shade or insulate the pumpkin against temperature swings across a season that occupies most of the summer. Genetics matter as much as technique, which is why seed saved from past record holders circulates widely among growers. A pumpkin at peak growth can put on tens of pounds in a day, and that pace is also why a split skin is the most common way a contender is lost before weigh-in.

Giant pumpkins have turned into a fall-festival attraction of their own. Organizers move winners with forklifts or small cranes for public display, and a few events hollow out oversized specimens into paddle-powered boats for novelty races on lakes and rivers.

These competitors account for a sliver of American pumpkin agriculture. U.S. Department of Agriculture crop reporting puts national production near 1.5 billion pounds a year, most of it carving pumpkins bound for retail lots and processing varieties bound for cans. Record-breakers get the attention, but the pumpkins that fill porches every October are grown by the acre.

Illustration: Quartz

Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF started in 1950, when a church group in Pennsylvania sent children out on Halloween to collect spare change alongside candy and send the proceeds to the United Nations Children's Fund. The idea spread through schools and youth groups, and UNICEF made it a national campaign in 1951.

The mechanics were simple enough to scale. Children carried small orange cardboard boxes door to door, asked for coins along with treats, then returned the boxes to a classroom or parish hall to be counted. Those boxes went out by the millions each autumn for much of the 20th century, and a great many American children first met the idea of international humanitarian aid through an errand they were already running on October 31.

The timing suited a longer effort to reshape the holiday. Civic groups had spent the decades after the 1920s looking for ways to steer Halloween away from vandalism and pranks, and pairing a charitable collection with the candy route gave the night a purpose beyond sweets.

The format has since moved away from coins. UNICEF built out online fundraising pages, school-based digital drives and mobile giving tools as Americans carried less cash, and the orange box now works more as a nostalgic emblem than a primary collection method. Halloween-season appeals have continued under several names, preserving the tie between the holiday and youth fundraising.

Money raised supports the core areas of UNICEF's work, including immunization, clean water and sanitation projects, nutrition programs and emergency relief in places hit by conflict or disaster. Cumulative fundraising figures are reported by UNICEF USA, the organization's U.S. fundraising arm, and the totals cited vary with the period and campaign being counted.

The campaign remains the clearest case of an American Halloween custom redirected toward a cause with no connection to the holiday's folklore. A night built around collecting candy became a recurring channel for children's aid abroad, and it has run in some form for more than seven decades.

Illustration: Quartz

Halloween is the largest candy-buying occasion on the American calendar, according to the National Confectioners Association, and most of that volume moves within a few weeks. The selling season opens in earnest in late September and ends on October 31, one of the most compressed major windows in U.S. grocery retail.

Shelf space fills long before shoppers are ready. Bags of miniatures turn up in supermarkets and big-box stores in August, ahead of costumes and lawn decorations, because candy keeps well and carries little markdown risk. A pallet of wrapped chocolate that sits through September still sells in October. An inflatable lawn decoration that sits that long gets discounted to clear.

Chocolate and non-chocolate candy serve different purposes in the same bowl. Bite-size versions of year-round chocolate brands anchor what most households hand out at the door. Non-chocolate items such as candy corn, gummies and lollipops are often chosen by the buyer rather than the recipient. They get picked for cost per piece and for holding their shape in states where late-October afternoons stay warm.

Purchasing works differently here than at any other candy occasion, because the product is bought for distribution rather than personal eating. Shoppers buy in bulk, reach for assorted variety bags that cover several preferences at once, and weigh pieces per dollar about as heavily as flavor. A household stocking up for a busy block is solving an arithmetic problem as much as a taste one.

The narrow window reaches back through the supply chain. Manufacturers lock in Halloween packaging, seasonal printing and novelty shapes months in advance, scheduling production so finished goods reach distribution centers by late summer. A forecast that misses cannot be corrected in October, because demand does not return once the night passes.

Whatever is left gets marked down sharply on November 1. Some of it is repackaged or redirected toward the next seasonal cycle rather than written off, which softens the risk of overstocking.

Illustration: Quartz

Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Snickers, M&M's and Hershey's milk chocolate bars sit at the top of nearly every Halloween candy preference survey conducted in the U.S. Chocolate dominates those rankings, and the same handful of brands reappears year after year regardless of who is doing the asking.

That consistency reflects ordinary American candy habits more than anything particular to October. The brands children hope to find in their bags are largely the ones that move well at drugstore checkouts in March. Halloween magnifies an existing hierarchy rather than creating a separate one, with the fun-size format as the main variable. The order of the leading brands shifts between surveys; the membership of that top tier rarely does.

Non-chocolate candy holds a clear second tier. Skittles, Starburst, sour gummies and lollipops all place respectably without unseating chocolate. They do better with younger children and with households buying for allergy-aware distribution, since several of the best-selling chocolate items contain peanuts or tree nuts.

The bottom of these rankings is just as stable: candy corn, circus peanuts, the black-and-orange-wrapped peanut butter chews and generic fruit-flavored hard candies. Low preference scores barely dent their presence in the seasonal aisle. They cost less per piece, hold up for months in a warehouse without melting or developing chocolate bloom, and fill a large bowl cheaply — which matters on a block where the doorbell rings for three straight hours.

Full-size bars work on different math. A full-size Snickers or Kit Kat costs several times what a miniature does per visitor, so the households handing them out stay a small minority of the total, and full-size bars make up a correspondingly small share of what actually ends up in children's bags.

Most buyers settle on variety packs instead. A mixed bag covers chocolate and non-chocolate preferences in a single purchase, keeps the cost per child low and removes the need to guess what any given trick-or-treater wants.

Illustration: Quartz

Halloween ranks second only to the winter holidays in U.S. spending on seasonal decorations, which makes it one of the biggest shopping occasions of the year despite involving almost no gift-giving. Candy, costumes, decor and greeting cards account for most of what Americans spend on the holiday.

Decorating has carried much of the growth. A front yard that once held a carved pumpkin and a cardboard skeleton may now hold an inflatable figure tall enough to clear a roofline, an animatronic prop triggered by a motion sensor, a projector throwing moving images onto a garage door, and orange and purple light strings hung with the same care as December displays. The shift mirrors the wider expansion of home decor spending around every holiday rather than anything specific to October 31.

Pet costumes are among the more visible newer categories. Outfits sized for dogs and cats barely existed as a mass-market product a few decades ago, and retailers now stock coordinated sets designed for an owner and an animal to wear together — a product line that follows the broader rise in what U.S. households spend on pets.

Adult costumes make up a larger share of the total than they once did. Bar events, office parties and adult-only gatherings create demand for sizes and styles unconnected to children's door-to-door collecting. That demand has turned costume retail into a year-round business for some specialty companies rather than a strictly autumn one.

Scale still favors December by a wide margin. Winter holiday spending dwarfs Halloween in absolute dollars, because it includes gift buying on a level no other American holiday approaches. Halloween's distinction is concentration rather than size: the money flows into three narrow categories, and nearly all of it moves inside a selling window of a few weeks. Retailers have to commit to candy orders, costume assortments and decor inventory months before the date arrives, with little room to restock anything that sells out in mid-October.

Illustration: Quartz

American Halloween costumes were almost entirely homemade until the 1930s, when a dedicated manufacturing industry took shape and turned dressing up into a retail purchase. Earlier costumes were improvised from old clothing, bedsheets, burlap, face paint and simple handmade masks, reflecting the holiday's folk roots rather than any commercial template.

Ben Cooper Inc. became one of the defining American costume manufacturers from the 1930s onward and held much of the children's market for decades. Its boxed sets paired a thin plastic mask, held on by an elastic band, with a printed smock that depicted the character rather than resembling actual clothing. That mask-and-smock pairing set the standard look of mass-market costumes through much of the 20th century. Surviving examples are now collected, largely for the licensed characters printed across the front.

Licensing drove the business then and still does. Manufacturers race to secure rights to whatever film, television or comic character is dominating popular culture in a given year. The result is that costume aisles work as a rough index of the previous 12 months in entertainment. Retailers plan seasonal inventory around box office schedules and streaming releases, placing orders months before anyone knows which character will be in demand on October 31.

Costume construction grew more ambitious as cosplay culture spread through the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Conventions normalized serious investment in fabrics, wigs, armor and prosthetics, and that craftsmanship carried over into Halloween among adults who treat a costume as a months-long project rather than an impulse buy.

Online retail widened the market again, offering a far broader range of sizes, price points and obscure character options than any single store could stock on a shelf. Pop-up costume shops remain part of the picture regardless. They open in vacant retail space each September and close within days of the holiday, built entirely around the narrow window when Americans shop for costumes. Their business depends heavily on last-minute buyers who need something in hand that night and will not wait for shipping.

Illustration: Quartz

Commercial haunted houses took shape as a distinct American business in the 1960s and 1970s, built largely by nonprofit groups rather than entertainment companies. Local chapters of the Jaycees, the civic organization formally known as the United States Junior Chamber, ran haunted houses as fundraisers, charging admission and turning the proceeds over to community projects. That model spread quickly because it required little more than a vacant building, volunteer labor and a few weeks of October.

Theme parks turned the format into a season rather than a single night. Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park, California, started its Halloween event in the early 1970s, converting the park after dark into a walkthrough attraction staffed by costumed performers. Universal Studios launched its own Halloween event in Florida in the early 1990s and later brought a version to Hollywood. Both showed that horror-themed entertainment could sustain weeks of ticketed attendance, which changed how operators thought about the autumn calendar.

Haunt design grew into a specialized field drawing on film makeup, theatrical set construction, animatronics and lighting. Trade organizations including the Haunted Attraction Association now serve a sector that reaches well beyond the haunted house itself to corn mazes, hayrides, scare zones and horror-themed escape rooms. Equipment trade shows run on their own annual cycle, with operators buying props and effects months before any customer walks through a door.

Volunteer-run attractions never disappeared. Fire departments, churches, schools and service clubs still operate seasonal haunts as fundraisers in many American towns, competing for the same audience as large commercial operations.

Year-round work is now standard behind the scenes even where the doors open only in autumn. Scripts, sets and effects are developed through spring and summer, and some larger attractions begin admitting visitors in September. A small number keep horror experiences running outside the season entirely, though the overwhelming share of revenue still arrives in the weeks immediately surrounding October 31.

Illustration: Quartz

Not every late-autumn celebration linked to Halloween is Halloween. Mexico's Día de los Muertos, observed November 1 and 2, is a separate tradition that combines Indigenous Mesoamerican beliefs about death with the Catholic observances of All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day. Families build home altars, or ofrendas, decorated with marigolds, photographs and the food and drink the dead favored in life. The focus is remembrance of named relatives rather than costumes or door-to-door candy collection.

Ireland and Scotland, where most of the customs behind American Halloween originated, still mark October 31 with bonfires, fireworks and apple bobbing. Irish households also bake barmbrack, a fruit loaf with a ring hidden inside, and whoever finds the ring is said to be the next to marry. Some rural bonfire gatherings descend directly from older Samhain practices rather than from the candy-driven version that took shape across the Atlantic.

Costume-wearing and trick-or-treating spread through the U.K. from the 1980s onward, pushed along by American films, television and seasonal retail. The imported version landed on top of guising, the older Scottish custom in which children in disguise performed a song, poem or joke before receiving a treat, so the two practices merged in parts of Britain instead of one replacing the other.

Germany's Martinstag falls on November 11, when children carry handmade paper lanterns through the streets in processions honoring St. Martin of Tours. The lanterns and the autumn timing invite comparison with Halloween, though the two share no origin and no common ancestor in the church calendar.

Japan has adopted a costume-driven version of the holiday over the past few decades, built around urban street gatherings and themed parties rather than residential trick-or-treating. Crowds in Tokyo's Shibuya district grew large enough that ward officials banned street drinking near the station and publicly asked visitors to stay away on October 31. South Korea's celebrations cluster in Seoul nightlife areas such as Itaewon and Hongdae, where costumes and bar events carry the holiday without its folklore or its place in the religious calendar.

Illustration: Quartz

A full moon falls exactly on October 31 only about once every 18 to 19 years. The mismatch between the moon's roughly 29.5-day cycle and the fixed 365-day Gregorian calendar keeps the two from lining up often. The last one came in 2020, and it was also a blue moon — the second full moon inside a single calendar month.

The arithmetic behind it is simple. A lunar month runs a little over 29 and a half days, while calendar months run 30 or 31 days. The date of each full moon slides earlier by about a day from one month to the next. Over a span of years, that drift works its way around the calendar, and any single date collects a full moon only at long intervals. Lunar phases follow a fixed mathematical pattern, so these alignments can be calculated centuries in advance.

What the moon does not do is change how people behave on Halloween night. The "lunar effect" — the belief that crime, emergency room traffic, car accidents or erratic behavior spike when the moon is full — has no consistent evidence behind it. The idea survives in popular culture and in hospital and police-station lore, but it has never held up as a measurable pattern.

The gap between symbol and fact has not dented the imagery. A large yellow moon behind a bare tree, a silhouetted bat or a witch on a broomstick is among the most recognizable shorthand for the holiday. It turns up on candy bags, greeting cards, window clings and inflatable lawn decorations, no matter what the moon is actually doing on October 31.

On most Halloweens, the moon overhead is a crescent or a gibbous, or it is not visible at all. The cycle is predictable enough to say the next Halloween full moon is close to two decades away. Until then, the full moon printed on the decorations is a design choice rather than a forecast.

Illustration: Quartz

The fear that strangers hand out poisoned or razor-laced candy to trick-or-treaters is an urban legend, not a documented pattern of crime. Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Delaware, has tracked reported cases of Halloween candy tampering back to the 1950s and found no substantiated instance of a stranger randomly killing or seriously injuring a child with contaminated treats.

Best's files instead contain hoaxes, misreported incidents and pranks by children that adults took at face value. The few genuine tragedies traced back to people the victims already knew. The case most often cited is the 1974 death of 8-year-old Timothy O'Bryan in Texas. His father, Ronald Clark O'Bryan, put cyanide in a Pixy Stix as part of an insurance scheme and was convicted of murder. A crime committed inside one family became the evidence base for a nationwide suspicion of neighbors.

The scare took hold during a decade when "stranger danger" messaging reached American parents through newspapers, television segments and school assemblies. Halloween supplied a ready-made scenario: children, darkness, unfamiliar adults and food handed over at the door. Warnings traveled faster than corrections, and the story resurfaced each October whether or not a new case supported it.

The institutional response outlasted the panic itself. Hospitals in many U.S. cities began offering free X $TWTR-ray screening of candy hauls in the 1980s, a service that could reveal a metal object but could not detect poison or chemical contamination at all. Police departments set up inspection tables in station lobbies. Some towns pushed families toward supervised parties and daytime mall trick-or-treating instead of residential streets.

Standard safety advice still tells parents to check wrappers for punctures or resealing and to throw out homemade items from households they do not know. The guidance costs a few minutes and harms nothing. Its staying power says more about how a vivid story embeds itself in a holiday's routine than about the danger it was written to prevent. Halloween night does carry real risks for children, but they involve traffic and dark clothing rather than tampered candy.