Debate: To Halloween, or to Halloweekend?

Halloween is one of the most beloved holidays for families everywhere. It’s the only holiday that requires public participation, giving it the spirit other holidays are lacking. 

With that being said, Halloween is being pushed around by the public as many are calling for the holiday to not have a specific day, but rather a specific weekend. People want to move the holiday away from the week for a variety of reasons, but we should honor Oct. 31 as Halloween.

Part of the excitement of Halloween is getting together with your friends late on a school night and collecting candy. October is always the first month of the school year kids look forward to because of the spirit-filled holiday behind it. Changing this day would be messing with something magical. 

Moving the holiday to a specific weekend may please some families, but it would also take away from the spirit of Halloween. Besides, it’s a holiday geared to let kids dress up as their favorite character and collect candy, does it really need a weekend?

Halloween doesn’t deserve to get a change in dates because it consistently serves as a favorite holiday for many people. Most already connect Halloween with Oct. 31, it’s a well-known tradition, so why change it now?

Now, we should remember what Halloween is truly about. The excitement of this holiday doesn’t stem from its day of the month, it comes from its spooky-fun ambiance. I’m talking about the nervous excitement we felt as trick-or-treating children, the rush of adrenaline we get stumbling through haunted houses as adults. Halloween is about the mood, it’s about the hairs on your neck standing up.

Sure, you could claim we’re all used to celebrating Halloween on Oct. 31, but are we really?

As adults, most of us celebrate Halloween by watching horror flicks, going to haunted houses with friends, or simply going out. Often, this means staying out until your eyes shrink for adults. Therefore, we’re often already forced to indulge in Halloween festivities on the weekend when the holiday falls on a week day. That is, unless you want to spend the next day as a groggy zombie. If Halloween was always celebrated on a Friday or Saturday, we could simply sleep through the next morning, like Dracula. Personally, I’d rather be a vampire than a zombie.

For children, trick-or-treating would be even sweeter if it was always done on the weekend. They could stay out later, which means more time searching for those houses giving out full-sized candy bars. For many of us, our fondest trick-or-treating memories are from a weekend Halloween, considering the later curfew and excitement of having the next day off to eat sacks of candy.