History — Noozify Original — October 30, 2026

The Ancient Festival That Wasn't: How Halloween Really Got Its Candy

By Dan Chafetz

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Explain our October 31st habits to a visitor from the fourteenth century and they would assume we had lost our minds. Millions of Americans open their front doors to costumed children they have never met and hand over sugar, no questions asked. This Saturday the ritual returns, and the National Retail Federation expects us to spend $13.5 billion on it. Which raises a fair question: who decided the reward should be candy, and why?

The version most of us absorbed in school goes like this. Halloween descends from Samhain, a Celtic harvest festival in what is now Ireland that marked the turn toward winter and, supposedly, a thinning of the border between the living and the dead. Pinning down when it began is harder than it sounds: Irish passage tombs aligned with the Samhain sunrise hint at prehistoric importance, and a second-century Gaulish calendar, the Coligny calendar, has a month name that seems related, yet Irish writers do not describe the festival until about the ninth century. Many accounts, including this Mental Floss history, treat Samhain as the settled precursor, with the Church later nudging All Saints' Day to November 1st so that the evening before became All Hallows' Eve, and eventually Halloween. The name itself is Christian. "Hallow" is an old word for a saint, from the Old English for holy, and Halloween is a Scottish contraction of All Hallows' Even, the evening before the feast of all the saints.

Scholars who have spent careers on the subject are less comfortable with that tidy story. Nicholas Rogers, a historian at York University and author of an Oxford University Press book on the holiday, allows that Samhain may have given Halloween "a supernatural charge and an intrinsic liminality" but little in the way of concrete ritual beyond bonfires. Ronald Hutton, whose work on the British ritual year is widely cited, has made the blunter point that we have "no idea" what the Celts actually did on the night.

Rogers pushes further. He finds "no hard evidence that Samhain was specifically devoted to the dead", and he argues that the Victorian anthropologist James Frazer read medieval All Souls' customs backward into Celtic prehistory. If so, much of what we call Halloween is medieval and Christian rather than pagan. Poor villagers went door to door asking for soul cakes in exchange for prayers, a practice known as souling, while costumed troupes practiced mumming, performing at doorsteps for food and drink.

Mexico's Día de los Muertos, celebrated on November 1st and 2nd, is often described as a Mexican Halloween, but the two are cousins rather than twins. Both sit in the same stretch of the church calendar, around All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day, and the Mexican holiday's origins are argued over much like Halloween's. Some scholars trace it to Indigenous Mesoamerican beliefs blended with Spanish Catholic practice, while the historian Elsa Malvido rejected any native roots at all. Its children do go door to door, a custom called the calaverita that resembles trick-or-treating without the mischief, but the heart of the holiday is remembrance, with family altars called ofrendas set out to honor the dead.

The custom crossed the Atlantic with immigrants, and the Irish fleeing famine in particular gave it new momentum, as this overview of trick-or-treating notes. For a long while, though, American Halloween was less about treats than about mischief. Organized trick-or-treating spread in the 1930s partly as a way to tame the dangerous pranks of the Depression years, then stalled during World War II when sugar was rationed.

Here is the detail that surprised me most. Candy scholar Samira Kawash told Smithsonian that Halloween "was not a candy holiday until well into the 1950s." Before that, a trick-or-treater might come home with nuts, coins, fruit, or a homemade cake, and the same interview mentions Kool-Aid and cereal snack packs advertised as appropriate things to hand out.

Then the confectioners noticed. They had already persuaded Americans that Christmas and Easter required candy, and they wanted a fall holiday of their own. According to the historian C. Lesley Bannatyne, Mars launched a 1950s campaign implying that children in costume would be everywhere on October 31st, and parents, believing it was the thing to do, sent their kids out. By 1965, Bannatyne says, the industry's Halloween take had reached about $300 million.

That seed has grown into a forest. In the NRF's 2026 survey of 7,889 shoppers, 96 percent said they plan to buy candy, good for $4.1 billion. Planned candy spending was only $2.6 billion in 2019 and reached $3.9 billion last year, according to NRF data compiled by CandyStore.com. Oddly, candy is not even the biggest line item anymore, since costumes ($4.4 billion) and decorations ($4.3 billion) edge it out.

Inflation is part of that story. Government figures put candy and gum prices up 8.1 percent in August from a year earlier, and a FinanceBuzz study cited by Finder found that a 100-piece bag now averages $16.96, up from $9.91 in 2021.

We put those two sets of numbers side by side. Planned candy spending rose 58 percent from 2019 to 2026, from $2.6 billion to $4.1 billion, while the government's price index for candy and chewing gum rose 51 percent over the same stretch of Septembers. Adjusted for those prices, Americans plan to buy only about 5 percent more candy than they did in 2019. Nearly all of the growth is in the price tag, and as we reported this week, the cocoa price collapse has yet to reach the candy aisle.

The other half of the holiday is the grown-up half. Rogers's book treats Halloween as a night of inversion, when ordinary social rules loosen and, in its publisher's words, a temporary freedom of expression takes over. Adults claimed that license for themselves decades ago (New York's Greenwich Village parade began in 1974), and it now sits beside New Year's Eve as one of the year's great excuses to party. Even by the narrow measure of liquor sales, New Year's Eve is the champion, ranked first by the marketing firm Womply for local alcohol retailers, but Halloween is a serious contender.

Does the drinking really go up? The evidence says yes, modestly. NielsenIQ tracked $3.39 billion in off-premise alcohol sales across the two weeks around Halloween and Día de los Muertos in 2022, up 4.2 percent from the year before, with ready-to-drink cocktails up nearly 11 percent. Drizly reported that Halloween weekend sales in 2021 ran 22 percent above the average of the previous four October weekends. A liquor store manager in Isla Vista, California, a famously rowdy Halloween destination, told the campus paper in 2009 that his weekend sales climb 20 to 30 percent, and summed it up in four words: "Halloween is my New Year."

Per person, the picture is more restrained. Adults surveyed by Alcohol.org say they have about three and a half drinks on Halloween, which is respectable but below what people report for New Year's Eve. The Nielsen window also blends in Día de los Muertos, so it can't isolate Halloween alone, and sales of non-alcoholic spirits jumped 71.5 percent in that same stretch.

The costs of the heavier nights are real, though. Federal figures reported by Spectrum News show 159 people died in drunk-driving crashes on Halloween night between 2017 and 2021, or roughly 32 a year. For scale, the country recorded 10,142 alcohol-impaired-driving deaths in 2019, about 28 a day, so Halloween packs about a full day's toll into a single night.

So the question we started with has an answer, if not a flattering one for anyone who loves a clean origin story. The candy at your door is no ancient offering to appease the dead. It is the newest layer on a holiday that has always borrowed whatever was at hand, medieval prayer in one century and Depression-era prank control in the next, with the advertising men arriving last.

What has stayed constant is the inversion Rogers describes: one evening when strangers knock, adults play at being someone else, and we pay in sugar for the privilege. Keep a bowl by the door on Saturday, and don't worry if the Celts wouldn't recognize it. Neither, it turns out, would most of our great-grandparents.