Best Halloween Tradition

One night a year, and a surprising number of mutually exclusive ways to spend it. That scarcity is what makes this bracket work at all. Halloween is unusual among holidays in that the traditions are almost entirely optional and almost entirely participatory. Nobody has to carve a pumpkin. There is no meal you are expected to cook, no relatives you are obliged to see, and no gifts to get wrong. What is left is a set of activities people do purely because they want to, which means this bracket is measuring genuine preference rather than obligation wearing preference as a costume.

Counting them up gives thirty-two of them, from the ones that take a week of preparation down to the ones that take an evening and a bowl of sweets by the door.

The split that emerges is usually generational rather than aesthetic. Trick-or-treating and trading the haul afterwards are memories for most voters rather than plans, and they end up competing against things people are actually going to do this year. Memory tends to win, which says something about the holiday.