Thanksgiving versus Halloween is a debate often discussed as the fall season approaches. However, the outcome is obvious—who doesn’t like Halloween more? Sure, Thanksgiving celebrates family and togetherness, but Halloween can also be a celebration of togetherness among your friends, creativity, and candy. After reading these descriptions, isn’t it obvious that Halloween is better? We already have a better Thanksgiving; it’s called Christmas.
Through personal experience as an Asian-American with relatives across the world, Thanksgiving just doesn’t serve as much of a purpose as Halloween does. While the celebration during Thanksgiving can be done through a virtual connection, Halloween allows people to get together and even connect with neighbors you never knew existed. Thinking of creative costumes is just a part of this interactive holiday, and dressing up with your friends makes it even more fun. I remember my friends and I were dressed as gang members for one year of Halloween, family for another, and even hippies at some point. Many argue that Thanksgiving is better as it creates meaningful memories, but they gloss over the fact that Halloween can also make memories that last a lifetime—plus, your childhood photos will look extra cool when you’re looking back at them.
Besides trick-or-treating, Halloween has other fun activities too. Bobbing for apples, decorating, carving pumpkins and visiting haunted houses are just some of the many things to do during this spooky holiday. Not only that, but Halloween literally boosts our economy. To quote BBC News, “money won’t stop flowing” with an expected record of $12.2 billion generated this year. You can get that Costco turkey for $47 or just get three $5 rotisserie chickens on Halloween and you’ll get two holidays in one; isn’t that the only food Thanksgiving has anyway?
When the Halloween holiday comes around, I can see the decorations in our neighborhood bring everyone together. We also used to have a fun tradition where we created a chain of gift-giving within our community — a sort of secret Santa, you might say — around the Halloween season. What I’m trying to say is, Halloween brings people together too. Rather than a family gathering, it’s a sort of community gathering that we can see being generated in this holiday season.
I feel like Halloween is a time where you can relax and have fun, whereas Thanksgiving comes with the endless amounts of food preparations and, to some, extreme anxiety from seeing their relatives. Let’s start with the only good qualities of Thanksgiving: food and family. Sure, there’s cranberry sauce and sweet potato casserole, but would you pass that up for a king-sized TWIX? Thanksgiving is great, but we have Christmas to do the same thing with better food. I can see why preferring to make food with family during Thanksgiving beats opening the door every minute to let in huge gusts of freezing Indiana air, and maybe when I get older, I’ll like Thanksgiving more. But for now, I still think that Halloween is the superior holiday.

The views in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of the HiLite staff. Reach Ella Guo at [email protected].