Halloween is a holiday celebrated on the night of October 31. Common Halloween activities include trick-or-treating, ghost tours, bonfires, costume parties, visiting "haunted houses", carving Jack-o'-lanterns, reading scary stories and watching horror movies. Irish immigrants carried versions of the tradition to North America in the nineteenth century. Other western countries embraced the holiday in the late twentieth century. Halloween is celebrated in several countries of the Western world, most commonly in Ireland (where it originated), the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and occasionally in parts of Australia.

Thanksgiving, or Thanksgiving Day, is a traditional North American holiday, which is a form of harvest festival. The date and whereabouts of the first Thanksgiving celebration is a topic of modest contention, though the earliest attested Thanksgiving celebration was on 8 September, 1565 in what is now Saint Augustine, Florida. Despite any scholarly research to the contrary, however, the traditional "first Thanksgiving" is venerated as having occurred at the site of Plimoth Plantation, in 1621.
Today, Thanksgiving is celebrated on the second Monday of October in Canada and on the fourth Thursday of November in the United States.