Happy Halloween, although I realize that at this point many of you have already been to your Halloween parties and pumpkin patches. Perhaps you took your kids to a well-regulated, daylight-hours “trunk-or-treat” or “trick-or-treat at local businesses” event. You’ve already carved pumpkins, been to haunted houses, and watched your fill of scary movies. You are done with Halloween. October 31st falls on a Monday this year. I realize a lot of people chose to get their Halloween festivities over with on more convenient days, but there are a lot of us for whom Halloween is not over yet.
Every year there are a few emails to our neighborhood email list asking, “What day is trick-or-treating?” I am always incredibly happy to see the responses saying simply “October 31st.” No further explanation needed. We trick-or-treat on Halloween. It’s that simple.
Sure, there are a lot of holidays that get observed on different (more convenient) days, but there are certain holidays that are not subject to fluid scheduling. We do not move Christmas or New Year’s celebrations simply because of the day of the week on which they happen to fall. Heck, for some reason the U.S. purposefully makes Thanksgiving a Thursday despite that being awkward for people who don’t automatically get the Friday off. Although I celebrate the Halloween season throughout October (and in my heart year round), the final celebration is always trick-or-treaters on October 31st.
Maybe you are already done with your Halloween. I am not. My neighbors are not. Tonight we will don costumes once more and plant ourselves on our porches in expectation of more than a thousand trick-or-treaters. On October 30th we were not taking down our decorations. Many of us were out adding more. No, Halloween is far from over.
Even if you don’t have any particular Halloween plans tonight consider watching one more creepy movie, sharing one more scary story, and leaving the porch light on with some candy ready even if you aren’t expecting trick-or-treaters. At minimum, hold off on the Thanksgiving and Christmas talk for one more day. It is still Halloween. Enjoy it. I sure as heck intend to.
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For the month of October, Listing Beyond Forty is Listing Toward Halloween, featuring posts related to or inspired by Halloween. Read all the other Halloween posts here.
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Kim Z. Dale 