For twelve years now, on a fall weekend in Newark, the world's most famous candy has thrown a party in the city where it was born. The M&M'S Halloween in Newark celebration returns Saturday, October 17, and Sunday, October 18, 2026, splitting its two days between the JFK Recreation Center at 211 West Kinney Street and the Marquis "Bo" Porter Sports Complex at 378 Lyons Avenue. Both days are free. Both are open to all ages. The only thing a family needs to bring is a willingness to show up.
Saturday's festivities run from noon to 5 p.m. at the JFK Recreation Center. On Sunday, the party moves to the Marquis "Bo" Porter Sports Complex, where it runs from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. The two-location format is deliberate: it lets more of the city's neighborhoods take part, and it gives families who can't make one day a second chance on the other. Those with energy to spare can attend both.
The headline attraction is the costume giveaway. Children can pick up a free full costume, which solves one of the more stressful and expensive parts of the season for many households. Organizers are also handing out tote bags filled with an assortment of Mars products — M&M'S, SNICKERS, SKITTLES and more — and offering a selection of size-inclusive costume kits while supplies last. This year's edition adds a few new wrinkles: guests can decorate pumpkins with their own flair, step into a 360-degree photo booth to capture the celebration, and visit a Mars candy station stocked with the company's classic treats.
There are also the quieter touches that have come to define the event. Organizers set aside a designated "sensory/quiet zone" for guests with neurodivergence or anyone who needs to step away from the noise and excitement for a few minutes. It's a small thing on paper, and a meaningful one in practice — the kind of accommodation that turns a big, loud, crowded celebration into something a wider range of families can actually enjoy.
The event is presented by Mars Wrigley in partnership with the City of Newark, and it has become one of the more reliable fixtures on the city's autumn calendar. Over the years it has taken different shapes. In 2023, for its ninth consecutive year, the celebration rolled out as the M&M'S Treat Truck, stopping at seven locations across Newark over three days — NJPAC, the Vince Lombardi Center, the Sharpe James Recreation Center, the Prudential Center's Championship Plaza and others — each stop offering Halloween totes, photo opportunities, a karaoke stage and an interactive craft station. By its tenth year, in 2024, the event had grown into a full festival experience, complete with a fog-filled pumpkin archway at the entrance, skeletons, M&M'S cutout displays, Halloween music, a pumpkin patch with hay bales and scarecrows, a "trick-or-treating door" where kids could knock and receive a bag of goodies, and a "Monster Bash" karaoke station set against a mad scientist's lab backdrop.
What makes the whole thing land differently in Newark is the history behind it. M&M'S was not imported to this city from somewhere else. It was invented here. In 1941, Forrest E. Mars Sr. returned to the United States and established M&M Limited in Newark, and the plain chocolate candies — the candy-shelled dragées that would become a global brand sold in more than 100 countries — were first produced in the city. The shell was the whole point: it kept the chocolate from melting, which made the candy a natural fit for soldiers' rations during World War II. The brand's own corporate history traces its 1940s origins to that Newark founding. So when Mars Wrigley brings a Halloween party to West Kinney Street, it is, in a real sense, coming home.
That homecoming carries a bittersweet edge this year. In July 2026, Mars filed notice with the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development that it would cut 307 positions at its Newark headquarters and shift corporate operations to Chicago, part of a consolidation tied to a $100 million expansion of its global snacking headquarters in Illinois. The layoffs were expected to be completed by mid-October — right around the time the candy trucks roll into the recreation centers. After more than 80 years in Newark, the company's corporate presence in the city is winding down, even as its most visible community tradition carries on.
The JFK Recreation Center itself has had a parallel arc of renewal. The facility at 211 West Kinney Street is one of Newark's premier athletic and community destinations, and it reopened after a $2.9 million renovation — its first since the 1980s — with Mayor Ras Baraka calling it "one of Newark's greatest public recreation facilities, serving our entire city." Hosting a free, two-day, no-capacity-gate Halloween celebration is exactly the kind of expanded community service that renovation was meant to enable.
Twelve consecutive years is a long run for any local event, and longer still for one that has never charged admission. The formula hasn't changed much: candy, costumes, music, crafts, and a place to be. But in a city that gave the world its most recognizable candy, and is now watching the company that makes it pack up its offices, there's something worth noticing about a tradition that keeps showing up anyway — free tote bags, free costumes, free entry, and a pumpkin archway waiting at the door.