My son is five this year, and that changes Halloween at our house.
When we moved to Casper in 2022, he was a baby who got stuffed into whatever costume fit over his snowsuit. The last couple of years he was old enough to enjoy it but young enough to get carried half the time. He held the candy bag and mostly looked confused about why strangers were handing him things. This year he picked his own costume. He’s changed his mind about it a few times, but he picked it. He wants to walk the whole route himself, and he’s already asking how many houses we’re going to.
Kimi and I have done plenty of cold-weather planning in our time. Neither of us expected to be using it on a five-year-old in a costume. Welcome to Halloween in Wyoming.
The Weather Gets a Vote
If you didn’t grow up here, here’s the part that surprises people. In much of Wyoming, snow by Halloween is normal. Cheyenne’s average first snow comes around October 7, and about 89% of the time Cheyenne has already seen its first fall snow before October ends. Laramie usually sees snow by mid-October too. So when the costume catalog shows a kid in a short-sleeve superhero suit on a nice fall evening, that kid does not live here.
Our best example is 2024. On October 29 and 30, a winter storm moved across the state. Casper got a little over 5 inches, which set a new snowfall record for October 29. Wright got around 13 inches, Gillette got 4 to 6, and Rock Springs, Green River, Evanston, and Lander all got hit too. Cowboy State Daily ran a photo of snow coming down on Halloween yard decorations in Casper, giant skeletons included. Their meteorologist Don Day called it “one of the colder Halloweens we’ve had in a while,” with overnight temps that Halloween running from the mid-30s down to the low 20s.
Not every year looks like that. Some years you get a dry, breezy, almost pleasant evening. But you plan for the cold, because the cold is what you usually get. That means the costume question at our house is never just “what do you want to be?” It’s “what do you want to be, and will it fit over a winter coat?” Or under one, depending on the costume. Animal costumes and anything with a big hood are great. A cape works fine over a puffy jacket. Anything tight or detailed is going to spend the night zipped inside a coat where nobody can see it, and you’ll be the one explaining that to a disappointed kid.
Our setup this year is simple: base layer, costume, coat, hat, gloves. Then we’ll argue about the gloves for ten minutes and give up once he figures out it’s hard to grab candy with mittens on.
Why Small Towns Do It Differently
Classic door-to-door trick-or-treating is built for suburbs. Houses are close together, sidewalks are lit, and you can hit thirty porches in an hour. That isn’t how a lot of Wyoming is laid out. Out in the country, the nearest neighbor might be a quarter mile away or more, down a gravel road, in the dark, in the cold. Nobody is walking that with a five-year-old.
So a lot of Wyoming towns have moved to formats that fit the place. One is the downtown trick-or-treat, where kids go store to store along Main Street during daylight hours. Towns like Sheridan and Casper have run these. You get daylight, you get businesses that are warm inside, and you get a whole street of costumes in one spot. It ends up feeling more like a community event than a candy run, and I like that.
The other big one is trunk-or-treat. Families park in a church lot, school lot, or community center lot, open their trunks, decorate them, and kids go car to car. It’s spread all over the country partly because it’s safer and easier than wandering dark streets. In Wyoming it makes even more sense: everything is packed into one parking lot, there’s a warm building nearby, and you can pull a car right up close for the little ones. Jackson Hole has historically centered its festivities on the Town Square, with trunk-or-treat as part of the fun.
I won’t give you dates and times here, because they change year to year. Check your town’s Facebook page, your kid’s school, or your church bulletin. That’s usually where the real schedule shows up.
What’s Waiting at Home
This is the part I’ve come to love most, and it’s why a Halloween piece ended up on a food blog.
When it’s 25 degrees and the wind is going, the best part of the night might be coming back inside. At our house, something warm is ready before we leave. For the kids, that’s hot chocolate or hot apple cider. Cider is a nice way to use the last apples from the fall markets. If you missed those, I wrote about Wyoming’s farmers markets closing for the season, and it’s worth planning around next year. A slow cooker of cider on low while you’re out makes the whole house smell like fall when you walk back in.
If your kid is walking the whole route this year like ours is, a good insulated kids’ thermos for hot cocoa or cider makes a real difference. A warm drink in hand buys you another block or two before anyone starts complaining about the cold.
We try to have something homemade on the counter too, so the night isn’t all wrapped candy. A loaf of spiced pumpkin bread is easy to make the day before, and it’s tuned for our altitude so it won’t sink in the middle. Caramel apples are the other one. They’re a project, but they’re fun to make with kids, and they’ll feel like they earned something.
Then, once the candy has been sorted and traded and the little one is finally asleep, Kimi and I usually sit down with a Wyoming Whiskey hot toddy. Parents earn one on Halloween night. Cold fingers, a few hours of crowd control, and one more year of watching your kid get a little bigger.
Tell Me How Your Family Does It
We’re still pretty new here, and every family I talk to seems to have its own way of getting through a Wyoming Halloween. Some people swear by the downtown events, and some drive to a different town’s trunk-or-treat every year. Some have a costume trick for getting a snowsuit to pass as a dragon. I’d love to hear yours. Leave a comment below or find us on Instagram or Facebook and tell me what’s in your mug when you get home.
Stay warm out there tomorrow night, and good luck with the gloves.
— Sean