Hiya! It's so exciting that this is your first event!
Here are the basics:
- Every 20 minutes a banner will appear on one of your pages, this will be big and bright on the bottom of the screen so it's pretty hard to miss (It looks like this v)

When you click it, it gives you what is called a token, which for halloween is usually a piece of candy. These are regular items and can be used for dressups as well!
- These tokens can be traded in to the event page which will open up on the 1st day of the event. For the duration of the event a big link to the event page will be on the front page of the site so you don't have to always look for it. Pets and items will be released every day of the event up to the day of the holiday (usually. The event usually lasts 10-11 days). These pets and items will remain on the event page for the entire event as well as about 5 days after (2 days for more token hunting, and 3 more to finish trade ins) before the event closes for good.
- Event pets and items come in special little gift boxes (they look like this v)

with usually 3-6 outcomes from each box. The community gets together on the outcomes thread on the forum to put together all that's come out for the day. Some pets however will be a 1:1 adopt, where you know exactly the pet you'll get. The same goes for items.
And thats the basic of the event! Haloween and Easter follow the same format, while the Summer Event and Advent are a bit different (advent is like you described, where things are only available for one day. While the summer event is more story heavy and a lottttt bigger).
My favorite way to hunt banners is to just reload one page until one pops up, then set a timer for 20 minutes. Pages that are small like the site timer on the bottom of the page are good since you can see the banner immediately.
Here's a link to last years halloween if you'd like, its a pretty good overview of what you can expect to happen each day:
https://wiki.chickensmoothie.com/Halloween_2024Hope this helped! Feel free to pm me if you have any more questions, I'm happy to help (and I'm the one who documents the events on the wiki lol)