These days the Halloween celebration includes three parades rather than one, including the nighttime Light Up the Night Parade showcasing illuminated parade balloons that travel down Main Street followed by the Grand Day Parade, a three-hour spectacle that weaves through the town. “I recently met a younger couple who said that they love Halloween so much that they decided to move here.” “It’s like a pebble being dropped into a pond, it’s really the people of Anoka who want to enjoy this hometown festival and then they bring along relatives and friends who tell others about it,” says Karen George, president of Halloween, Inc., the nonprofit organization responsible for executing Anoka’s Halloween celebration. Most people hear about the celebration by word of mouth.Īnoka installed a pumpkin roundabout in 2017. These days the annual event has increased into a month-long celebration that draws Halloween lovers from around Minnesota, the United States, and even the world, swelling the population to 60,000 throughout October. That was the purpose of the celebration, to divert pranksters and keep them busy.”įortunately, the plan worked, and every year since 1920 (save for 19 due to World War II), Anoka has been holding Halloween festivities that include a parade, loads of treats and minimal tricks. ![]() “, the pranks were getting bigger and bigger, with kids throwing chickens off of buildings,” says John Jost, who serves as chair of the celebration’s 100th anniversary, which will occur in 2020. To prevent a similar debacle from happening the following year, civic leaders banded together to create a Halloween celebration that would not only prove entertaining for people of all ages, but would also curb any attempts at future hijinks. ![]() As the sun rose, community members were greeted by wagons parked precariously on rooftops, overturned outhouses and cows roaming freely throughout downtown and inside the halls of the county jail. It all began on November 1, 1919, the day after Halloween, when Anoka residents woke up to a prank of epic proportions at the hands of some of the local youth. For almost a century, residents of the small Minnesota town located about 20 miles northwest of Minneapolis have been holding a community-wide celebration in honor of October 31, eventually earning the town of nearly 18,000 the title of Halloween Capital of the World. No city in the country-or the world-does Halloween quite like Anoka, Minnesota.
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