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As anyone who travels frequently knows, airfare costs around the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays can be significantly higher than those for the same route at other times of the year. It’s little surprise why: the year-end holiday period sees millions traveling to visit family and friends, creating demand for flights; the more demand, the more airlines can charge.

The good news, according to travel experts at Google Flights, is that if you are planning to fly for Thanksgiving or Christmas, you still have a small window of time to get the lowest airfare possible for the winter holiday 2026 period before prices go up—but you have to act fast.

If you know you are going to be traveling by plane this Thanksgiving—and you haven’t purchased your tickets yet—you shouldn’t wait much longer. As a matter of fact, the ideal time to purchase your Thanksgiving flights may have just passed.

According to a blog post from the travel experts at Google Flights, the search giant’s flight aggregator and comparison tool, there is a period before the holiday when flights are generally at their lowest. This period is generally 21 days to 57 days before departure.

So, if your Thanksgiving flight departure date is actually on Thanksgiving—November 26 this year—that means airfares will be at their lowest between September 30 and November 5 (adjust those dates accordingly to your actual Thanksgiving departure plans).

The prices during this period, of course, are not fixed. They’ll change by the day based on demand and other metrics. On some days, the same flight could be more expensive or cheaper. 

But Google Flights notes that there is one day on which its data shows that Thanksgiving flights are generally at their lowest. That day, for 2026, is 34 days before departure.

Using flying on Thanksgiving morning as an example, the 34-day prior mark means airfare was most likely lowest on Friday, October 23. If you’re planning on flying on the Wednesday or Tuesday before Thanksgiving, the cheapest fares for you were likely on October 22 or October 21.

Does that mean you’re out of luck if you haven’t already purchased your Thanksgiving flights? Not necessarily. Remember, Google says flights should remain at their lowest until about 21 days before departure this year. That gives you until the first few days of November to purchase your airfare—but the sooner, the better.

If you haven’t purchased your Christmas airfare yet, you should do it soon. That’s because, according to Google, the lowest prices for Christmas flights occur much farther out than they do for Thanksgiving flights.

According to Google, the lowest prices for Christmas flights are 33 to 67 days before departure. Given Christmas is on December 25, and assuming you would be flying that morning, that means that the lowest prices for Christmas flights would generally be found between October 19 and November 22. Of course, since most people travel before Christmas Day, those dates shift even earlier.

If you’re looking for the day with the statistically lowest Christmas airfare prices this year, Google says the “lowest prices hit 56 days before departure” in 2026. If you are traveling on Christmas Day, that means the day you are likely to find the cheapest flights will be this coming Friday, October 30.

When it comes to airfare, the internet is full of advice that purportedly shows you how to save even more—from using VPNs to buying tickets on a Tuesday to clearing your browser’s cookies.

But could these so-called hacks actually save you money on your Thanksgiving or Christmas flights?

It’s unlikely, no matter what time of year you are flying. That’s according to Google Flight’s James Byers, who is a group product manager at Google Search. Last year, I asked Byers if Google Flights data showed whether any of the three most common bits of conventional wisdom about buying airfare held up—at least when searching for flights on Google’s aggregator.

Byers revealed that clearing cookies or using Incognito mode didn’t impact airfares on Google Flights. When it comes to using VPNs to try to trick airlines into thinking you’re in a country where prices may be lower, Byers said it may work—until you have to turn over your billing address for your payment method. At that point the VPN-adjusted local fare will likely no longer be available to you. 

As for buying flights on a Tuesday, supposedly the day of the week airfare is cheapest, Byers said there was some truth to that. But airfares were generally only about 1.3% lower than on the most expensive day, Sunday.

As for this holiday season, Google Flights data show that the best time to buy, if you want the lowest airfare possible for your Thanksgiving or Christmas trip, is quickly approaching its end.

I was a card-carrying scaredy-cat through my childhood and early teen years, but the release of Wes Craven’s 1996 film Scream single-handedly turned me from nervous Nellie to horror aficionado overnight. Watching Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott fight back against Ghostface helped me understand the delights of feeling deliciously scared.

But watching horror films does more than just raise your heart rate. Scary movies reveal and reflect the cultural fears we collectively grapple with, making each era’s horror films a time capsule of society’s biggest concerns at the time.

Money has always been a common source of anxiety, so it should come as no surprise that some of the scariest villains in our favorite horror movies can also represent our financial worries. Here are the surprising money lessons you can learn from iconic movie monsters.

Unlike most movie bad guys, we never actually see Death as a character in James Wong’s 2000 film Final Destination. In this movie, Alex Browning (Devon Sawa), a high school student, has a vision that the plane he and his classmates are taking to Paris will explode in midair. Alex, plus five other students and one teacher, are removed from the plane before takeoff—only for the plane to blow up just like in the premonition.

Unfortunately for Alex and the rest, by getting off the plane before it exploded they have cheated Death, which will now claim the lives of each of these accidental survivors, in the order of their intended deaths. And because Death is a bit of a diva, each victim is killed in increasingly unlikely ways.

While the Final Destination franchise as a whole makes it clear that there is no satisfactory way to avoid Death, we can still glean some important financial lessons from the film. Specifically, it’s vital to understand the real risks you face.

In the film (and in life), Death is inevitable and impossible to avoid. Alex tries to keep Death at bay by hiding in a remote cabin. He tries to avoid all risk and makes himself nuts thinking through the creative ways Death may come for him in the cabin. Similarly, risk-averse individuals might keep their money in cash rather than investing it. To avoid a possible loss of principal, they condemn their money to inevitably lose value to inflation.

At the other end of the risk spectrum is Carter (Kerr Smith), who intentionally stops his car on a train crossing to prove that the survivors have nothing to fear. Although Alex saves him from an oncoming train, the crash kills their friend Billy (Seann William Scott) in an especially nasty fashion. Carter reflects the kind of investor who doesn’t believe anything bad can ever happen to their money. Rather than risk-averse, they are simply risk-ignorant and may need to be rescued from their reckless choices.

Samara (Daveigh Chase) from Gore Verbinski’s 2002 film The Ring is one of the creepier horror villains in recent memory. As the homicidal ghost of a little girl, Samara finds her victims via cursed VHS tape.

Once you’ve watched the strange video, you have seven days before she arrives to kill you—by crawling through your TV. The only way to save yourself from Samara is to make a copy of the tape and ensure someone else sees it, so the villain can continue killing without end.

Just like multilevel marketing, Samara’s curse depends on constant recruitment of a downstream network. Rachel (Naomi Watts) is able to avoid death because she made a copy of the original VHS tape that she gave to her ex-husband, who Samara kills. The film ends with Rachel helping her 8-year-old son, who has seen the tape, make a new copy for someone else to find.

As with MLMs, the only way to stay afloat after Samara’s curse is to bring her new people. Each recruit will either be consumed by Samara or provide her with new victims to consume. Similarly, each new MLM “employee” will either lose money to the scheme or bring in more people to help their recruiter make more money.

No matter how curious you might be, just refuse any opportunity to watch a creepy videotape or join a friend for a “product party.”

The titular villain of Bernard Rose’s 1992 film Candyman was killed in a horrific lynching in the 19th century. After the lynch mob replaced his hand with a hook, they covered him with honeycomb and let a swarm of bees sting him to death. One hundred years later, Candyman continues to haunt and terrorize the residents of the spot where he died, which became the Cabrini-Green Homes public housing project in Chicago.

While the film offers a great deal of commentary about race, privilege, and class, the best financial lesson from the film was behind the scenes.

Candyman is associated with bees. They fill his ribcage and mouth, and he uses his bees to subdue Helen (Virginia Madsen), the main character. The late Tony Todd, who played Candyman, negotiated with Rose to receive an additional $1,000 bonus for every bee sting he got during filming. His 23 bee stings increased his salary by $23,000 ($55,236 in 2026 dollars).

Although the bee scene required Todd to have his mouth filled with the stinging insects—a process that reportedly took a half hour to complete—the actor recognized the significance of the bee symbolism for his character and the film. In a 2019 interview, Todd said, “Everything that’s worth making has to involve some sort of pain. Once I realized it was an important part of who Candyman was, I embraced it.”

But Todd didn’t just accept these truly difficult filming conditions. He negotiated a way to make each potential bee sting a personal win, while also giving the production a financial interest in keeping him as safe as possible.

It was inevitable that Todd would get stung during these scenes, so he found a way to make it less likely and worthwhile. When we are similarly faced with unavoidable difficulties, we can take a page from Todd and turn the inevitable negatives into a win-win scenario.

You may not expect to learn a thing or two about money when you sit down to watch a scary movie. But iconic horror villains can teach us better money management even while scaring us.

This Halloween, whether you revisit Death’s Rube Goldberg machines in Final Destination, Samara popping out of a television in The Ring, or Candyman bestowing a bee-filled kiss in Candyman, you can learn to better understand risks, ignore the siren song of multilevel marketing recruitment, and negotiate win-win scenarios in difficult situations.

But you may also want to be careful around stoves, televisions, and mirrors, too. Just in case.

As anyone who travels frequently knows, airfare costs around the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays can be significantly higher than those for the same route at other times of the year. It’s little surprise why: the year-end holiday period sees millions traveling to visit family and friends, creating demand for flights; the more demand, the more airlines can charge.

The good news, according to travel experts at Google Flights, is that if you are planning to fly for Thanksgiving or Christmas, you still have a small window of time to get the lowest airfare possible for the winter holiday 2026 period before prices go up—but you have to act fast.

If you know you are going to be traveling by plane this Thanksgiving—and you haven’t purchased your tickets yet—you shouldn’t wait much longer. As a matter of fact, the ideal time to purchase your Thanksgiving flights may have just passed.

According to a blog post from the travel experts at Google Flights, the search giant’s flight aggregator and comparison tool, there is a period before the holiday when flights are generally at their lowest. This period is generally 21 days to 57 days before departure.

So, if your Thanksgiving flight departure date is actually on Thanksgiving—November 26 this year—that means airfares will be at their lowest between September 30 and November 5 (adjust those dates accordingly to your actual Thanksgiving departure plans).

The prices during this period, of course, are not fixed. They’ll change by the day based on demand and other metrics. On some days, the same flight could be more expensive or cheaper. 

But Google Flights notes that there is one day on which its data shows that Thanksgiving flights are generally at their lowest. That day, for 2026, is 34 days before departure.

Using flying on Thanksgiving morning as an example, the 34-day prior mark means airfare was most likely lowest on Friday, October 23. If you’re planning on flying on the Wednesday or Tuesday before Thanksgiving, the cheapest fares for you were likely on October 22 or October 21.

Does that mean you’re out of luck if you haven’t already purchased your Thanksgiving flights? Not necessarily. Remember, Google says flights should remain at their lowest until about 21 days before departure this year. That gives you until the first few days of November to purchase your airfare—but the sooner, the better.

If you haven’t purchased your Christmas airfare yet, you should do it soon. That’s because, according to Google, the lowest prices for Christmas flights occur much farther out than they do for Thanksgiving flights.

According to Google, the lowest prices for Christmas flights are 33 to 67 days before departure. Given Christmas is on December 25, and assuming you would be flying that morning, that means that the lowest prices for Christmas flights would generally be found between October 19 and November 22. Of course, since most people travel before Christmas Day, those dates shift even earlier.

If you’re looking for the day with the statistically lowest Christmas airfare prices this year, Google says the “lowest prices hit 56 days before departure” in 2026. If you are traveling on Christmas Day, that means the day you are likely to find the cheapest flights will be this coming Friday, October 30.

When it comes to airfare, the internet is full of advice that purportedly shows you how to save even more—from using VPNs to buying tickets on a Tuesday to clearing your browser’s cookies.

But could these so-called hacks actually save you money on your Thanksgiving or Christmas flights?

It’s unlikely, no matter what time of year you are flying. That’s according to Google Flight’s James Byers, who is a group product manager at Google Search. Last year, I asked Byers if Google Flights data showed whether any of the three most common bits of conventional wisdom about buying airfare held up—at least when searching for flights on Google’s aggregator.

Byers revealed that clearing cookies or using Incognito mode didn’t impact airfares on Google Flights. When it comes to using VPNs to try to trick airlines into thinking you’re in a country where prices may be lower, Byers said it may work—until you have to turn over your billing address for your payment method. At that point the VPN-adjusted local fare will likely no longer be available to you. 

As for buying flights on a Tuesday, supposedly the day of the week airfare is cheapest, Byers said there was some truth to that. But airfares were generally only about 1.3% lower than on the most expensive day, Sunday.

As for this holiday season, Google Flights data show that the best time to buy, if you want the lowest airfare possible for your Thanksgiving or Christmas trip, is quickly approaching its end.

A new ranking puts animal control officers ahead of paramedics and emergency physicians for exposure to bites, contaminants, and other on-the-job risks.

Inc.’s Ethics columnist tackles a tough leadership question.

Founding member of Planxty, Lunny went on to play for bands such as Moving Hearts, the Bothy Band and Coolfin

The Irish traditional musician Dónal Lunny has died at the age of 79 from cancer.

Lunny rose to prominence in the trio Rakes of Kildare alongside his brother Frank and Christy Moore. He went on to play in bands such as Planxty, Moving Hearts, the Bothy Band and Coolfin among others and toured the world.

Google has made Data Agent Kit generally available, a free set of MCP tools and 37 open-source skills that connect coding agents to more than fifteen Google Data Cloud services. Two kinds of guardrail ship with it, and practitioners need to tell them apart: one is a skill asking the agent to stop, the other an IAM deny policy that refuses the call.