Last week, a long-ignored petition to change Halloween from October 31 to the last Saturday of the month finally started to pick up steam. Now the petitioners, apparently high on the sudden virality of the initiative, are demanding more.
In a new amendment to the Change.org petition, the Halloween & Costume Association is proposing an entirely new holiday: National Trick or Treat Day. The new holiday would fall on the last Saturday of October, leaving devoted Halloween loyalists to celebrate the original holiday (presumably sans the trick or treating aspect) on the 31st, as the Halloween gods intended.
We hear ALL of you… pic.twitter.com/xNsQKNDwqH
— Halloween Costume Assoc (@Halloween_Assoc) July 30, 2019
While the petition’s organizers never specified their exact reasoning behind the original push to reschedule the holiday to a Saturday, claiming only that the shift would make for a “safer, longer and stress-free celebration,” the group presumably aims to keep young trick-or-treaters off the streets after nightfall, when they are at a higher risk of being struck by motor vehicles. Weekend trick or treating could also help kids and parents avoid the fallout from missed bedtimes due to mid-week festivities.
These are reasonable arguments, but even if the petition were to succeed on paper, its vision probably wouldn’t play out in practice. With the addition of a separate holiday reserved specifically for trick or treating, it would be hard to police the parents and children who would continue to observe the holiday in full on October 31. More likely than not, adding an extra “trick or treating” holiday would just leave neighborhoods subject to the tyranny of costumed, sugar-crazed children twice in one week.
Moreover, Halloween, for all intents and purposes, is already a multi-day, if not month-long celebration. Halloween festivities dominate most communities throughout the month of October, and, as I noted last time we covered this, college students have been celebrating “Halloweekend” for years.
Either way, the Halloween & Costume Association has gone mad with power, and, according to CNN, they’ve now partnered with Party City to launch the ambiguous #ALLoween campaign, which reportedly hits shelves on September 13. In the meantime, hopefully we’ve all learned an important lesson about what happens when you give too much attention to a small organization of Halloween enthusiasts, and we can all go back to the rest of our summers.
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