Halloween is by far the biggest holiday in the Verde Valley. The big day is Thursday, Oct. 31, as resi­dents and visitors celebrate the holiday with parties, concerts and trick-or-treating all over our cities and surrounding communities.

As you can read on Page 1A of the Friday, Oct. 25, edition or on our website (click here), reporter Joseph K. Giddens has highlighted all the public events in the Verde Valley, including Clarkdale’s annual trick-or-treating in the Clarkdale Town Park around the gazebo, The Camp Verde Parks and Recreation Department’s Main Street Trunk-or-Treat and screening of the animated film “Hotel Transylvania,” trick-or-treating at the Cottonwood Recreation Center and Sedona’s huge Uptown Trick-or-Treat, the largest event in the Verde Valley.

Sedona’s event has annually brought more than 3,000 children and adults to walk the streets of Uptown, collecting candy from employees as they wander from business to business through the night, sometimes making the circuit more than once.

The Clarkdale event is perhaps the best-attended by kids and families looking to show off their costumes at one location. Homes in Clarkdale go all out with decorations, which are pretty amazing to see.

Old Town Cottonwood merchants host a similar event on Main Street, and the city of Cottonwood also hosts trick-or-treating at the Cottonwood Recreation Center.

There are also trunk-or-treat events in down­town Camp Verde, which the town estimates bring out several thousand costumed revelers. Various churches around the Verde Valley host smaller events for people who want to avoid the crowds, and many local bars are holding costume contests with live music. If you don’t want the crowds of Sedona or the long walks involved in going door-to-door, then trunk-or-treats are nothing to dismiss. In 2020, when many events were canceled during the COVID-19 pandemic, I took my daughter to five trunk-or-treats in one evening and she made out like a bandit.

The best part of public trick-or-treating or trunk-or-treating is seeing the thousands of children running around in costume, often with their parents in related costumes.

The really creative costumes are the ones that generally snag the eyes of our photojournalists when they shoot photos for publication.

My 6-year-old daughter has had her heart set on going as a velociraptor after she won a cool articu­lated mask from the Sedona Public Library’s Summer Reading program. My wife and our 2-year-old twins are still finalizing our costumes. Lots of things work in theory, but convincing a hyperactive boy and a headstrong girl that the fun costume they like is something to actually wear is proving … “elusive” is what I want to say, but “rolling disaster” would be more apropos. My wife is the better parent and will surely overcome the toddler egos I cannot control.

I bought some new pieces to alter my go-to Jedi costume and will be going as a fallen Jedi or Sith Lord with a red lightsaber, hoping to battle some Force-sensitive younglings or Jedi Knights I may encounter.

If you’ve never been to a big public trick-or-treat in Uptown or Clarkdale, I highly recommend you attend and see what happens when residents put aside our formality and our egos to become carefree chil­dren again.

Halloween allows us to dress up as the fictional heroes or villains we wish we could be, the celebri­ties or historical figures we adore, the puns we find funny and even as caricatures of popular cultural figures. Some costumes only require a wig and some facepaint, while others are assembled over years and cost hundreds of dollars.

We encourage all our readers to celebrate the creativity of our community and attend an event or two, even if it is just a private house party.

If you have a really great costume, or see one at an event, please email a photo of it to us at editor@ larsonnewspapers.com and we’ll share them. Please include the name of the person in the costume and the name of the person taking the photo. If you see our photojournalists out and about, pose for a photo. We’ll post galleries on our websites.

We will see you out there. Happy Halloween.