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How Halloween Got Its Pumpkin
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The Business of Halloween
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Why We Pay to Be Scared
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Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

In a museum in County Mayo, Ireland, there is a plaster cast of a turnip that has been carved into a face, and it is not the friendly kind. It dates from the early 1900s, has craggy teeth and narrow eye slits, and looks like it holds a grudge. The curators call it a "ghost turnip," and for centuries this, not the pumpkin, was what Halloween looked like. The holiday began as Samhain (pronounced sow-in), the Celtic new year, which fell on November 1. The Celts believed that on the night before, the dead crossed back into the world of the living, so people lit bonfires, wore disguises and carved frightening faces into turnips, beets and potatoes to keep wandering spirits away.

The Church, which had a habit of renovating pagan festivals rather than demolishing them, moved in next. In the 8th century, Pope Gregory III shifted the feast honoring all saints from May 13 to November 1, landing it right on top of Samhain. The day became All Hallows, the night before became All Hallows Eve, and the name slowly wore down to Halloween. The old customs survived the rebranding. In England, the poor went "souling," trading prayers for the family's dead in exchange for small pastries called soul cakes. In Scotland and Ireland, children went "guising," dressing up and knocking on doors for food or coins, which is trick-or-treating in everything but name.

An 18th-century Irish folktale told of Stingy Jack, often said to be a blacksmith with a fondness for drink, who tricked the devil twice and was turned away from both heaven and hell. The devil gave him a burning coal, which Jack put inside a hollowed turnip to light his way as he wandered forever. When millions of Irish fled the Potato Famine for America, Jack sailed with them, and the immigrants found that the local pumpkin was far easier to carve than a rock-hard turnip. Halloween still had some convincing to do, since the Puritans of New England had strongly opposed it, but by the 1920s and 1930s towns were throwing parades and parties. Over the next few decades, guising and souling turned into trick-or-treating, and the 1950s baby boom made it a night for children. Back in Ireland, meanwhile, electric light arrived in the 1930s and the tale of Stingy Jack began to fade. He had finally found somewhere to go, and it was America.

On Halloween morning in 2024, while most people were still looking for their car keys, DoorDash watched its orders jump by more than 160% between 8 and 10am. A second rush hit at 6pm, when orders of what the company called "emergency candy" rose by over 70%, which is the precise moment a household discovers the bowl is empty and the doorbell is ringing. Some of the week's other bestsellers were less innocent. In Halloween week, egg orders rose 28% and toilet paper 21%, and it seems unlikely that everyone was baking.

Those panicked orders are a small slice of a very large night. The National Retail Federation expects Americans to spend $13.5 billion on Halloween this year, beating last year's record of $13.1 billion, or about $115 for every person celebrating. The surprise is that candy is not the biggest line on the bill. Costumes are, at $4.4 billion, just ahead of decorations at $4.3 billion, while candy comes third at $4.1 billion, even though 96% of celebrants plan to buy some. Americans, in other words, now spend more on dressing up themselves and their front lawns than on feeding the neighborhood. They also start early, since 49% of shoppers began in September or before, which explains why skeletons appear in stores before summer has packed up.

What lands in the bowl has its own strange economy. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups were DoorDash's most ordered Halloween candy last year for the third year running, and Takis beat pretzels and Goldfish as the top treat that was not candy at all. Further down the list, the numbers get odder. Orders of Circus Peanuts, the orange marshmallow candy almost nobody admits to liking, rose 350%, and raisins rose 60%, which suggests that some homes are either deeply nostalgic or quietly sabotaging the trick-or-treaters. Generosity is rising as well, and full-size and king-size bars grew to 20% of candy orders. Nearly half of shoppers even said they would use AI to help them shop, presumably to ask whether a 12-foot skeleton counts as a sensible purchase. For a holiday built on handing things out for free, it is a remarkably good business, and its most reliable customer may be the person staring at an empty bowl at 6pm.

Full report below.