Everyone we know is giving out candy: Halloween from Seinfeld to Bangalore

Earlier this month at the Chicago Theatre, Jerry Seinfeld took the audience back to the night a child first works out what Halloween is. I was in that audience. In the bit, which he has been doing since his 1998 special I'm Telling You for the Last Time, the kid turns to a friend in complete disbelief and asks whether it is really true that everyone they know is giving out candy. He acted out the whole scene.

Jerry Seinfeld on stage in December 2016. Photo by slgckgc, CC BY 2.0. Top photo: jack-o'-lanterns in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, November 2010, by daryl_mitchell, CC BY-SA 2.0. Both via Wikimedia Commons.

For many of us in the Indian community, the bit lands somewhere else. We remember the year our children made that discovery on a street in Naperville or Edison, while we stood at the end of the driveway still working out the rules ourselves. We learned on the job. For a lot of immigrant families, Halloween is the first American holiday the children teach to the parents.

Niki Bhatia learned it fast. She landed in the United States on October 30, 1976, and wrote years later on her Goodreads blog that by the next evening "my mother had decided to dress me up as an 'Indian Princess.'" The costume was a chaniya choli. On the Northwest Side of Chicago in those years, she remembered, children stayed out for hours and came home with a pillowcase full of candy. The next year her parents splurged on facemasks.

Other parents took longer to come round. Vineet Chander, then the coordinator for Hindu life at Princeton University, grew up in the 1980s when Diwali often fell in the same week as Halloween, and he wrote in HuffPost that trick-or-treating usually won. His parents found it morbid. His mother asked, "What kind of depressing holiday is this supposed to be, anyway?" By 2013 his daughter and her uncle were giving the family jack-o'-lantern a Vaishnava tilaka.

Maples in full colour in Ontario, Canada, in October 2026. Photo by Nishant Prasad.

Part of the pull, I think, is the weather. Halloween arrives at the best moment of the Midwestern fall, and the beautiful weather of these weeks seems to come with the holiday already baked into it. Sweaters come out.

By the last week of October the trees at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle are well into their turn, and the arboretum's scientist Christy Rollinson has described colour rolling through its collections from early October into November. It never lasts long. Lincoln Park Zoo's Fall Fest, where families can pick up a pumpkin, runs Fridays to Sundays until November 1.

Then the children grow up, and some of them move back to India with children of their own. In Bangalore, apartment complexes such as Sobha Jasmine and Adarsh Apartments now hold trick-or-treat evenings, and children in costume go door to door through the buildings. It is not clear how many complexes do.

In 2017 the magazine Little India found it already settled in a Bangalore community full of returned NRIs and expats, where the dancer Shruti Narayanan described children knocking only at flats with a printed sign reading "Sweetmeats available." Narayanan is a returned NRI herself.

The Indian version has its own rules. Some households in Narayanan's community leave a pot of chocolates and toffees outside the door. The children help themselves.

An early 20th-century Irish turnip jack-o'-lantern at the National Museum of Ireland – Country Life, photographed in 2009. Photo by rannṗáirtí anaiṫnid, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The holiday those children carried home was itself an immigrant once. It grew out of the Gaelic festival of Samhain and the church's All Hallows' Eve, and Irish and Scottish families who sailed to North America in the 19th century brought their guising and their carved turnip lanterns with them. The pumpkin won because it was easier to carve.

The phrase "tricks or treats" first appeared in print in The Sault Daily Star of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, on November 1, 1917. The United States came next. It spread into the northern and western states in the 1930s.

The Northalsted Halloween Parade on Halsted Street in Chicago, October 31, 2017. Photo by AlasdairW, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The grown-ups never quite gave it back. The National Retail Federation expects Americans to spend $13.5 billion on Halloween this year, up from a record $13.1 billion in 2025, according to the survey it released on September 22. Half of consumers plan to wear a costume.

In Chicago the adult night belongs to Lakeview, where the Northalsted Halloween Parade closes Halsted Street between Belmont and Addison on October 31. Diwali comes eight days later. It falls on Sunday, November 8. More than one Naperville family will probably wear a saree to one party and a witch's hat to the other. The saree wins on style, for me.

Here is what is on around Chicago and the western suburbs this year. Times move from year to year, so check each organiser's page before you set out.

• Arts in the Dark Halloween Parade, Saturday, October 24, 6 to 8 p.m., Columbus Drive from Balbo Drive to Jackson Boulevard, Chicago. Free. Details
• Boo! at the Zoo, Brookfield Zoo, through Sunday, October 25, with weekend trick-or-treating from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Included with admission. Details
• Family Spooktacular, Naper Settlement, Naperville, October 24 and 25. $15 for adults, $10 for children aged 4 to 12, free under 4. Details
• Halloween Happening, Riverwalk Grand Pavilion, Naperville, Sunday, October 25. Free. Details
• Fall Fest, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago, Fridays to Sundays through Sunday, November 1. Free entry; rides are ticketed. Details
• Howl-o-Ween, Morton Arboretum, Lisle, Saturday, October 31, 9 a.m. to noon. Arboretum admission plus a $7 dog ticket. Details
• Northalsted Halloween Parade, Halsted Street from Belmont Avenue to Brompton Avenue, Chicago, Saturday, October 31, 7 to 8 p.m. Free to watch. Details