Every Time America Tried to Cancel Halloween
Quick Answer
Has Halloween ever been banned? Not nationally, but it has come close several times. After widespread rioting on Halloween 1933, American civic leaders openly debated cancelling the holiday outright. Sugar rationing from 1942 to 1947 stalled trick-or-treating during the Second World War. Evangelical churches campaigned against Halloween through the 1980s Satanic Panic and built trunk-or-treat and harvest festivals as replacements. In 2020 no US state banned trick-or-treating, though El Paso did. Halloween is now celebrated by roughly 74 percent of Americans.
On Halloween night in 1933, police in Bismarck, North Dakota used tear gas on roughly 300 teenage boys. The boys had dragged junk cars and garbage onto the high school grounds. One of them was shot in the legs by a resident who had apparently had enough.
That was not unusual that year. It was just the part that made the paper.
Bismarck used tear gas
Across the country that night, windows were smashed, cars were flipped, streetcars were pulled off their rails and fires were set. Newspapers called it Black Halloween. In Fargo, six boys from prominent families were charged with malicious mischief for pulling false fire alarms and wrecking property. Others spent the evening shooting out porch lights and smashing the ornamental streetlamps on Eighth Street.
The Depression was three years deep. Nobody had anything to do. Halloween had been a night for property destruction in America for decades, and 1933 was the year it stopped being funny.
Civic leaders met afterward and put two options on the table. Cancel Halloween, or find something else for the naughty boys to do.
Fred Maage threw a party instead
A Fargo businessman named Fred Maage argued for the second one. The Junior Chamber of Commerce organized citywide Halloween parties with costume contests, wrestling matches, movies and dancing. Give them the night. Give them somewhere to put it.
The 1934 headline in Fargo read that Halloween damage was light as the youths of the city cavorted at two celebrations. Police reported almost nothing. The model spread nationally and turned into the organized, supervised, candy-based holiday that trick-or-treating became.
The cure for Halloween was more Halloween. That is the pattern, and it holds every single time.
Sugar went on the ration book in 1942
On 4 May 1942 the Office of Price Administration issued War Ration Book Number One. People called it the Sugar Book. Allowances dropped to half a pound per week, half of prewar consumption.
Trick-or-treating stalled. A candy holiday does not work without candy. Rationing did not end until June 1947, which means American children lost five Halloweens in a row and a generation came up barely knowing the custom.
The rebuild was commercial and fast. UNICEF started handing out collection boxes in 1950. Peanuts ran Halloween ghosting strips in October 1951. In 1952 Disney released an eight-minute Donald Duck short called Trick or Treat that functioned as an instruction manual for a country that had forgotten how. By the end of that year the custom was locked in permanently.
The churches built a replacement
The 1980s attack was theological rather than logistical. Halloween got folded into the Satanic Panic, alongside heavy metal, Dungeons and Dragons and day care centers. Jack Chick's tracts put it in front of millions of people in comic form. The argument was that the holiday was pagan in origin, which is true, and therefore demonic in practice, which does not follow.
Evangelical churches pulled their congregations out and built alternatives: harvest festivals, fall festivals, Hell Houses that staged abortion and damnation instead of chainsaws. In the 1990s, with reports pointing to Alabama around 1994, trunk-or-treating appeared. Families park in a church or school lot, open their trunks, and children collect candy without walking a street.
Trunk-or-treat was built to replace Halloween. Cities and secular community groups now run them too. The alternative got absorbed, the way everything else did.
Nobody actually cancelled 2020
Everyone remembers Halloween 2020 as the year it was called off. It was not.
The CDC labeled door-to-door trick-or-treating a high-risk activity in September 2020, and the coverage did the rest. Los Angeles County banned Halloween gatherings and parties with people outside your household, and recommended against trick-or-treating, but did not prohibit it. San Diego County, San Jose, San Francisco, Long Beach, Milwaukee and Cleveland all discouraged it. As of 28 October 2020, not one of the fifty states had banned traditional trick-or-treating.
El Paso, Texas did. One American city out of thousands outlawed door-to-door and trunk-or-treating outright. People turned their porch lights on anyway and built candy chutes out of PVC pipe.
Seventy-four percent
The National Retail Federation's most recent survey puts Halloween participation at about 74 percent of Americans and spending at a record thirteen and a half billion dollars. Participation passed pre-pandemic levels and kept going.
Ninety-three years after civic leaders in Fargo sat in a room deciding whether to end the holiday, roughly three quarters of the country is buying costumes for it. The riot got turned into a party. The rationing got fixed by a cartoon duck. The panic built a parking lot version that people now attend in addition to the real thing, not instead of it. Every attempt to kill it was absorbed and metabolized, which is a very Halloween way for things to go.
The one problem nobody has solved is 1 November. There is no committee for that.
We made Long Live Halloween for the people who leave the decorations up. It runs with Pumpkin Summoner, and the whole Halloween collection is built on the assumption that spooky season does not have an end date. If you want the part of the story that comes before all this, we wrote the whole origin separately.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Has Halloween ever been banned?
Never nationally in the United States, but it has been close and it has been banned locally. After the 1933 riots, civic leaders in cities across the country openly debated cancelling it and chose organized parties instead. In 2020, El Paso, Texas banned both door-to-door and trunk-or-treating, while no state did. Individual schools and towns have restricted costumes and parties many times over.
Why do some churches not celebrate Halloween?
The objection is that the holiday has pagan roots in the Celtic festival of Samhain and that its imagery treats the occult as entertainment. That opposition hardened during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, when Halloween was grouped with heavy metal and Dungeons and Dragons as a supposed gateway to devil worship. Many congregations replaced it with harvest festivals, Hell Houses, or trunk-or-treat events rather than dropping the date entirely.
Is Halloween satanic?
No. Its origins are pre-Christian and Celtic, not Satanic, and Satanism as an organized thing postdates the holiday by roughly two thousand years. The association was manufactured in the twentieth century.
What is trunk-or-treating and where did it come from?
Families park in a lot, decorate their car trunks, and children collect candy from vehicle to vehicle instead of house to house. It began at churches in the 1990s, with reports pointing to Alabama around 1994, as a safer and more controlled alternative to conventional trick-or-treating. It is now run by cities and schools as well.
Was trick-or-treating cancelled during World War II?
Effectively, yes. Sugar rationing began on 4 May 1942 and cut household allowances to half a pound a week. The custom stalled for the duration and rationing did not end until June 1947. It was rebuilt afterward by candy companies, a 1950 UNICEF collection campaign, Peanuts strips in 1951 and a 1952 Donald Duck cartoon that showed children how it worked.
How many Americans celebrate Halloween?
About 74 percent, according to the National Retail Federation's most recent consumer survey, with spending at a record level and participation above where it sat before the pandemic.
