Halloween lands on October 31 every year — a night of costumes, candy and jack-o'-lanterns with roots more than two thousand years old. This countdown ticks down to the next one, live.
Halloween traces back to Samhain, the Celtic festival marking summer's end, when the boundary between worlds was said to thin. Christianity layered All Hallows' Eve on top of it, Irish and Scottish immigrants carried the customs to North America, and trick-or-treating took its modern form in the 1930s–50s.
The carved pumpkin comes from the Irish legend of Stingy Jack, doomed to wander with a burning coal in a hollow turnip. In America, the native pumpkin proved much easier to carve — and much bigger.