Boo Buckets are back to scare up some McDonald’s Halloween fun

If you were a kid back in the 1980s and 1990s, the McDonald’s Happy Meal around Halloween was unrivaled. Sure, Happy Meal toys back then were always fantastic, but when trick-or-treat time rolled around, you could get a Halloween bucket at McDonald’s.

I’m still envious of the people who had the ghost bucket. We had a bunch of pumpkin buckets and a witch bucket at our house, but we never got the ghost one. It glowed in the dark! How could I not have been envious of the kids who had that one.

At some point during the 2010s, McDonald’s stopped offering the Halloween pails. I’m not sure the reasoning behind that decision, but like many great Happy Meal perks from back then — the iconic Hot Wheels/Barbie summer duo, those lemon-y McDonaldland cookies — it appeared that the Halloween buckets had been locked away in the terrifying Officer Big Mac prison somewhere deep in the confines of McDonaldland.

But then something magical happened a few years ago.

McDonald’s brought the Halloween pails back, dubbing them “Boo Buckets” and making them available once again in the classic trio of the orange pumpkin, green witch and white ghost. (The ghost was back!)

Our daughter was a few months shy of a year old when these Boo Buckets were released in 2022, but I still journeyed out to our nearest McDonald’s to try to snag one for her. (This was 100 percent for a baby. Not at all for me.) By the second day of this Happy Meal promotion, our McDonald’s was already out of Boo Buckets.

The popularity of Boo Buckets was apparently enough for McDonald’s to keep bringing them back in the years since their 2022 resurrection. In 2023, they shuffled the lineup, offering an orange pumpkin, green Frankenstein’s monster, white mummy and a purple vampire. Last year, they were available in orange, white, green and blue with monster printing.

For 2025, McDonald’s returned to the more traditional lineup of Boo Buckets, with an orange pumpkin, green witch (which McDonald’s claims is a goblin?) and white ghost while adding a black cat and red zombie. I wasn’t going to miss them this year.

What they cost

At my McDonald’s a Boo Buckets Happy Meal with a hamburger was $4.69 and a Boo Buckets Happy Meal with a 4-piece McNuggets was $4.99. Both versions of the Happy Meal also come with a kids fry, apple slices and your kid’s drink of choice. (Our daughter always goes with the Orange Lavaburst Hi-C. Because she has taste.)

My thoughts

OK, so this isn’t your traditional Snackology review. A McDonald’s hamburger or their McNuggets aren’t new, and we all know what they taste like. (You’ll never go wrong with McNuggets, but there are absolutely better options when it comes to getting a burger there.) But I couldn’t pass up a chance to check out the Boo Buckets this year.

“Halloween buckets are popping up everywhere like ghosts in the night — and hey, imitation is the most BOO-tiful form of flattery,” the McDonald’s website notes. “But let’s be real: there’s only one OG Halloween bucket, and it comes with a Happy Meal.”

That’s some considerable shade from McDonald’s, but they’re right. Everyone has a Halloween bucket these days — Dunkin, Tim Horton’s, Burger King — but McDonald’s has the only one that’ll unlock a wave of nostalgia for those of us who had them back in the 80s and 90s. (The two big differences from the buckets back then are that the current versions are slightly smaller and don’t include a proper lid.)

My McDonald’s wound up having three designs still available: The pumpkin, the black cat and the zombie. The Boo Buckets went live on Tuesday, and demand had already wiped out two of the designs! (Next year, ghost ...)

The orange pumpkin is your classic Boo Bucket design. This is the one that we had several of as kids, getting years of play out of them in the basement and in the sandbox. All of the 2025 Boo Buckets have three designs printed on them.

While the pumpkin is the godfather of McDonald’s Halloween pails, the other two Boo Buckets that my McDonald’s had are the latest additions to the roster. The black cat is fun on its own, but I’m sure it pairs well with a witch Boo Bucket.

After the ghost bucket that I’ve dreamed of since childhood and the classic pumpkin, the zombie Boo Bucket was high on my list of options that I was hoping my McDonald’s would have this year. While the other buckets come in colors that you’d traditionally associate with Halloween — orange, green, white and black — the zombie comes in a vibrant red.

Snack score

🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪 (5 out of 5 cookies)

I’m not sure if a snack score can be properly applied to Boo Buckets, since you’re not supposed to eat them. (Please don’t try to eat them. There’s already enough microplastics in everything else we consume.) But if you want to properly ring in the Halloween season with some fast-food fun, there’s no better way to unlock that joy than with the latest wave of Boo Buckets.

Boo Buckets were provided to Snackology for this independent review.