McAlester News-Capital, McAlester, OK

Local News

September 10, 2008

Priddle prognosticates city will celebrate Halloween on Halloween

By Susan Brittingham

Halloween will be celebrated on Oct. 31 in McAlester this year.

“We’re going to have Halloween on Halloween,” Mayor Kevin Priddle said, adding that McAlester has a football game that night, too.

McAlester will play Tulsa East Central at home at 7:30 p.m. Before that, the mayor said, there will be a carnival in downtown McAlester sponsored by the Lions Club and the Main Street program members.

“There will be trick or treat in the street,” Priddle said. “Other towns are invited as well.”

The carnival is to end right before the football game starts.

To help get people in the mood for Halloween, here are some facts about the holiday, which dates back to Celtic rituals thousands of years ago:

• 36 million: the estimated number of potential trick or treaters in 2007 — children 5 to 13 — across the United States. This number is down about 38,000 from a year earlier, according to the census report.

• 110.3 million: number of occupied housing units across the nation in 2007 — all potential stops for trick or treaters.

• 93 percents: percentage of households with residents who consider their neighborhood safe.

• 1.1 billion pounds: total production of pumpkins by major pumpkin-producing states in 2007.

For adventurous spirits, there are several Halloween-sounding places to visit, besides the well-known town of Tombstone in Arizona.

North Carolina has Pumpkin Center and Transylvania County while Arkansas has a town named Pumpkin Bend.

There are two places with “fear” in their names: Cape Fear in New Hanover County and Cape Fear in Chatham County, both in North Carolina.

And then there’s Skull Creek, the Nebraska town with a population of only 274 souls.

Contact Susan Brittingham at 421-2029 or e-mail sbrittingham@mcalesternews.com.

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