Since Halloween Falls On A Wednesday This Year, Here's When To Celebrate It

Halloween is one of those love it or hate it kinds of things, with some people celebrating as much and for as long as they can and others trying to pretty much avoid the fray altogether (or, at least limit it to trick-or-treating). Regardless of your feelings about the actual day or even dressing up in costume, however, there are tons of fun things that you can do to celebrate the holiday and fall in general that can be done on Halloween weekend. But when is Halloween weekend 2018? Because Halloween falls on a Wednesday this year, it can be sort of difficult to determine if the weekend celebrations themselves should happen on the weekend before the holiday or the weekend after.

Really, you can decide to celebrate Halloween whenever you want. I'm not going to judge you if you want to celebrate the weekend before and the weekend after or just pick one or the other. But if you're hoping to participate in events on Halloween weekend or you just want to do Halloween things on the "right" weekend, you may need to have more of an idea of which weekend is the one that people have sort of collectively decided is the correct weekend and which one isn't so that you can plan accordingly.

After doing a quick search of planned Halloween events in various cities, it appears that Halloween weekend 2018 is, indeed, the weekend before the actual day. To me, this makes sense. After all, since Halloween falls on the last day in October, the following weekend is November and you're finally starting to move past Halloween and towards Thanksgiving. The weekend before is still October and Halloween hasn't happened yet, so there's still some anticipation associated with your celebrations.

The city of Chicago, for instance, has a number of Halloween-related events happening all around the city listed on the Choose Chicago website. The majority of these events are scheduled to take place on Saturday, October 27 and Sunday, October 28, with the exception of parades scheduled for Halloween itself and a few additional events. Nashville's Visit Music City site also lists many events happening between October 25 and October 27, such as Halloween Ball Y'all and Halloween at the Mansion.

For those of you who really would prefer to celebrate the first weekend in November, you're not completely event-less, but there are certainly fewer Halloween-related things to do then than there are in the month of October (which, let's face it, is basically just a full month of Halloween celebrations). If you're looking to set your party or festivities apart from the crowd, however, the weekend after Halloween just might be the way to go.

There are a ton of different autumnal activities that you can do to celebrate Halloween at any point throughout October and even into November, regardless of the exact day or weekend you'd like to celebrate. So just because it seems that the consensus is that the "official" Halloween weekend is the weekend before Halloween, October 26 through October 28, know that you can celebrate your favorite holiday (or your kids' or partner's favorite holiday) whenever you please.