6 FL Cities Rank Among Nation's Best To Celebrate Halloween

FLORIDA — As the spooky season creeps into the Sunshine State on Thursday, six Florida cities may make great additions to your schedule as they were named among the best places to celebrate the traditionally scary holiday.

Personal-finance website WalletHub released on Oct. 22 its 2024 Best Cities for Halloween, with Miami peaking at No. 3 among the top 10.

The cities on the best list were scored out of 100 points based on their rankings in the following categories: trick-or-treater friendliness, Halloween fun and Halloween weather.

“Halloween holds a big place in American popular culture, and we collectively spend billions of dollars celebrating every year," WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo said in a news release. "At the same time, it’s also a holiday that comes with a certain amount of risk, given that children visit strangers’ houses in the dark. The best cities for Halloween are those that provide the safest conditions for celebrating, along with an abundance of activities, Halloween-related stores and good weather.”

See how Florida cities fared on the top 100 list:

• Miami, No. 3, total score of 60.77
• Hialeah, No. 14, total score of 53.99
• Orlando, No. 16, total score of 53.75
• Tampa, No. 23, total score of 51.44
• St. Petersburg, No. 85, total score of 39.43
• Jacksonville, No. 86, total score of 39.37

According to WalletHub, pumpkin patches and Halloween party supply stores are plentiful in Miami.

The city known as the 305 has the ninth-most Halloween costume stores and ninth-most candy stores per capita, making holiday essentials more accessible, according to the analysis.

"Miami also has plenty of places to go trick-or-treating, with the sixth-highest population density in the nation. It’s the sixth-most walkable city, too," WalletHub said in its report.

For those not trick-or-treating, analysts said Miami has the 14th-most amusement parks and ninth-most movie theaters per capita. The southern town also has the 13th-most bars and clubs per capita.

The town with the most costume stores is Orlando, which ranked fifth for most candy and chocolate stores per capita in the U.S.

Though Hialeah has the fewest candy and chocolate stores, there is no other city above the Miami-Dade County town for the percentage of potential trick-or-treat stops. St. Petersburg ranked 97th for the latter.

Here are the top 10 best places to celebrate Halloween:

1. New York, New York
2. Jersey City, New Jersey
3. Miami, Florida
4. Las Vegas, Nevada
5. Chicago, Illinois
6. Los Angeles, California
7. Washington, D.C.
8. Anaheim, California
9. Boston, Massachusetts
10. Gilbert, Arizona

Halloween is traditionally observed on Oct. 31 and was established by the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. Festival-goers would spark bonfires and don costumes to ward off ghosts, according to the History Channel.

The annual holiday was originally deemed All Hallows Eve and later became known as Halloween - which was observed as a marker for summer's end and "the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death," the History Channel stated.

Pope Gregory III, during the 18th century, proclaimed the day after Halloween as All Saints Day as a way to honor all saints.

"Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of Oct. 31, they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth," the History Channel stated.

In the U.S., Halloween largely gained popularity in the South, specifically in Maryland.

Since its inception, the Celtic holiday has been Americanized, and celebrations include gatherings, trick-or-treating, costume-wearing and the carving of jack-o-lanterns.

According to the History Channel, Halloween is the second-largest commercial holiday after Christmas nationwide. Roughly $6 billion is spent yearly during Halloween in the U.S.

>> See WalletHub's full report here.