A few years back, a friend of mine loaded her two kids into their costumes, a pumpkin and a fairly convincing ketchup bottle, and drove to Brady Park at 12:45 on a Sunday afternoon expecting a crowd. She got an empty ballfield and a confused Little League parent walking his dog. The parade had been the Sunday before, not the one she circled. She had used last year's date.
That mix-up happens more than you would think, and it is not because anyone is careless. The Village of Massapequa Park's Annual Halloween Costume Parade, run in Brady Park by the Knights of Columbus, Our Lady of the Island Council, together with the Village, does not fall on a fixed date. The dates listed here all fall on the last weekend of October. It moves. And once you see the pattern behind the movement, you stop guessing.
The Parade Tracks Halloween, Not the Calendar Square
Line up the recent years and the logic becomes obvious. In one year the parade landed on Sunday, October 29. In another, it was Sunday, October 30. Most recently, in 2025, it fell on Sunday, October 26. Three different Sunday dates, one event.
In the years listed, the parade fell on the last Sunday before Halloween itself. Since Halloween lands on a different day of the week every year, "the last Sunday before it" slides earlier or later depending on how the calendar falls.
| Year | Halloween fell on | Parade held |
|---|---|---|
| A recent year | Tuesday | Sunday, October 29 |
| Another year | Monday | Sunday, October 30 |
| 2025 | Friday | Sunday, October 26 |
Halloween 2026 falls on a Saturday. If the pattern holds, the last Sunday before that would be October 25. Treat that as an educated guess built from a few years of precedent, not a confirmed date. The Village has moved event dates before, Park After Dark got bumped from a May date earlier this year, and the safest move is to check the Village calendar once it goes up in September rather than trust a formula from a blog post, including this one.
What Happens Once You're There
The mechanics of the day itself have stayed consistent for years, which is its own kind of reassurance if this is your first one. Registration opens at noon in Brady Park. The parade and costume judging start at 1 p.m. Judges score entries on creativity, originality, and execution, and prizes go out across four age brackets: under one year old, one to three, four to six, and seven to nine. There is a Grand Prize for the best overall costume on top of the age-group awards. Every participant gets hot dogs, soda, and candy, which is the detail that tends to matter most to the actual attendees.
If it rains, the whole thing relocates to the Knights of Columbus hall at 2 Eastgate Road in Massapequa Park. That is not a backup venue picked at random. It is the same council's home base, which tells you something about how tightly this event is stitched to the organization running it rather than to the Village calendar in general.
Brady Park itself earns its role as the venue. Beyond the parade, it is the Village's busiest park: a tournament-grade Little League field, a children's playground, basketball, bocce, pickleball and horseshoe courts, and a Community Center used heavily by senior programs. It also backs directly onto Massapequa State Park Preserve, with picnic areas overlooking the trout-stocked lake there, and it doubles as an entry point to the Bethpage Bikeway trail system. On parade Sunday it is simply doing what it does every other weekend, just with more candy on the ground.
A Village Calendar Run by Volunteers, Not a Department
Here is the part that is easy to miss if you only think about the parade as a single afternoon. It is not a Village Hall production. It is organized by a fraternal Catholic men's organization, the Knights of Columbus council named Our Lady of the Island, in partnership with the Village. That partnership model is not unique to Halloween.
Massapequa Park's calendar leans on a handful of local organizations that have quietly kept running these events for years:
- The Halloween Parade, organized by the Knights of Columbus, Our Lady of the Island Council
- Irish Night, held each summer by the Ancient Order of Hibernians
- The Independence Day Parade, run by the Village itself along Lakeshore Drive and Park Boulevard
- Breakfast in the Park, a June tradition the Village runs with help from the Massapequa Park Road Runners club
None of these are contracted out to an events company. They are volunteer-run, which is part of why the details, dates especially, can shift from year to year in ways a purely municipal calendar wouldn't. It also explains why the Halloween Parade has such a specific, almost old-fashioned structure: four narrow age brackets for toddlers and young kids, a modest grand prize, hot dogs served out of a park pavilion. It reads like an event built by people who know exactly which families show up, because they have been running it long enough to know.
Marking the Day Without Getting Burned
If you are new to the neighborhood, or if last year's mix-up sounds a little too familiar, here is the practical version of everything above. Don't write October 29 or October 30 on your calendar just because that is what a search result or a flyer from a few autumns ago says. Count backward from Halloween itself. Whatever Sunday falls right before October 31 that year is very likely your date. For 2026, that points to Sunday, October 25, arrive by noon if you want to register a costume for judging.
Bring a jacket. Late October afternoons in Brady Park can turn cool once the sun drops behind the tree line near the preserve. And if the forecast looks rough that morning, don't assume the parade is canceled. Check whether it has simply moved two blocks over to the Knights of Columbus hall on Eastgate Road, because that has been the standing plan for as long as the parade has existed in its current form.
Living here means learning these small mechanics eventually, usually by getting one wrong once. The parade date, the rain venue, the fact that a men's fraternal council runs a piece of the Village's fall calendar as reliably as any department does. None of it shows up on a real estate listing. All of it is what makes a random Sunday in Brady Park feel like the neighborhood, rather than just a park.
If you have questions about Massapequa Park beyond the Halloween calendar, from what a specific block is like to walk in the evening to how the village's parks connect to each other, I grew up in this stretch of the South Shore and I am raising my own kids here now. Reach out anytime through Christine Biordi, and if you are the type who likes knowing a neighborhood's rhythms before you need them, that curiosity tends to pay off eventually, whether or not a move is anywhere on your mind yet.
