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Halloween Has Always Been Mushroom Season
Halloween is the one night a year adults are allowed to be strange in public. You can wear a giant mushroom on your head, chat with strangers on their porches and eat dinner out of a pillowcase. Nobody blinks.
So it’s a little funny that most of us celebrate the weirdest night of the year in the most predictable way possible. A bag of fun size bars, a sticky punch bowl, a costume you can’t sit down in, and a Sunday that quietly disappears.
There’s a better version of the 31st. It has more pumpkins, fewer regrets, and a small, well measured mushroom right at the centre of it.
Fall rain is what brings mushrooms up, so the forest starts fruiting right as the costumes come out.
Americans are expected to spend $13.5 billion on Halloween this year, and about $4.1 billion of that is candy.
Only 54% of US adults drink at all now, the lowest number Gallup has recorded in nearly 90 years of asking.
A mushroom Halloween keeps the whole night, and the next morning too.
The forest dresses up for Halloween too
Walk any trail in late October and you’ll see it. Mushrooms on fallen logs, mushrooms in the lawn, mushrooms pushing up through the leaf litter like they got an invitation. In a way they did. A mushroom is the fruit of a much bigger organism living underground, and it waits on water. As N.C. Cooperative Extension puts it, “Mushrooms typically emerge after a rain event due to their reliance on water for spore germination.”
Fall brings the rain. The rain brings the mushrooms. Halloween just happens to be standing there when they show up.
Toadstool rings, witchy woods, fairy tales with a mushroom on every page. People have tied mushrooms to this time of year for as long as anyone has been telling stories, and honestly the mushrooms earned it. They’re the most on theme thing in the whole season, and they didn’t even need a costume.
The usual Halloween costs $13.5 billion and a Sunday
The National Retail Federation expects Americans to spend $13.5 billion on Halloween in 2026, around $115 a person, according to its annual survey. Candy is still the headline, with 96% of shoppers planning to pick some up and roughly $4.1 billion going into those orange bags.
Then there’s the punch. For a lot of grown ups Halloween is a drinking night first and a costume night second, and this year the 31st lands on a Saturday. Four mini chocolate bars, a jello shot and something green in a red cup have a full runway. You already know how Sunday goes from there.
We have nothing against candy. We will be eating candy. The point is that the weirdest, most fun night on the calendar deserves better than the default setting.
Everybody’s drinking less anyway
Gallup’s 2025 survey found that only 54% of US adults say they drink at all, the lowest in the poll’s nearly 90 year history. Among adults under 35 the drop is sharper, from 59% in 2023 to 50% in 2025. Half of young adults now skip the drink entirely.
That’s the crowd walking into your Halloween party. If the person handing out shots at the door has started to feel a little out of date, that’s because they are. We went deeper on the shift in Awkward Runs in the Family. The Open Bar Doesn’t Have To.
What a mushroom Halloween looks like
Think of it as Halloween with the volume set exactly right. Here’s how ours tends to go.
Late afternoon the pumpkins come out. Carving goes better with steady hands and a good playlist, and it’s where a Clarity capsule fits in nicely. Clarity is our light strength. Most people describe it as a soft lift in mood and ease that they can actually notice, while staying completely themselves.
Dusk is porch duty. A parade of tiny superheroes, three dinosaurs and one very serious ghost. Somebody always shows up dressed as a mushroom. Give that kid two bars.
Later, the party. A microdose sits well in a room full of people in costume. If you’d rather chew than swallow a capsule, Sour Gummies are the crowd favourite, and the folks who already know how they respond reach for Wavy, our regular strength.
Or skip the party completely. A lantern on the porch, a horror movie you’ve seen nine times, a blanket, s’mores over the fire pit. Some of the best Halloweens on record are four friends and a fire.
If you want more ideas for the season, we put together a whole list in Summer Was Loud. Fall Is Where the Good Stuff Happens.
The honest part
We’ll always tell you what the research says, including the parts that don’t flatter us. The largest placebo controlled microdosing study so far, Szigeti and colleagues in eLife (2021), had 191 people blind themselves to whether they were taking a microdose or a placebo. Both groups reported feeling better, and the difference between them wasn’t significant. The authors read that as expectation carrying a lot of the reported benefit.
We think that’s worth knowing, and it says something useful about a night like Halloween. If expectation and setting matter that much, then building a good night matters too. Good people, good snacks, a playlist, a plan for getting home. Every one of those is fully in your hands.
A few house rules for the 31st
Keep it a microdose. Halloween is loud, crowded and designed to spook you, which makes it the wrong backdrop for a big dose. Save a heavier night for somewhere quiet and familiar, and leave the haunted house to sober you.
Go easy on stacking it with drinks. Mixing makes it hard to tell what’s doing what, and the whole point is a night you remember.
Eat a real dinner before the candy, sort your ride home before you leave, and if you’re new, start at the lowest strength and see how you feel. Our edibles dosing guide walks through the numbers.
The quiz takes about a minute and points you at the right strength for the night.
Forest, leaf, picnic and fire photos via Unsplash, by iggii, Merve Sehirli Nasir, cara eliason and Sergio Zhukov.