A petition on Change.org is demanding that Halloween as a holiday be moved from its traditional date of October 31 to the last Saturday of October. Actually there seem to be two competing petitions on the site, written with similar poverty of English usage, and they're both wrongheaded and dumb. Here are the reasons why.
1) The petitioners claim that this move will make the holiday safer for moppets, presumably because they can go trick-or-treating in daylight hours. But Halloween falls on a Saturday or Sunday about twice every seven years, and kids still don't come during daylight hours. I can promise you that. One year when it fell on Sunday I actually got all made up as Frankenstein's monster, green makeup and everything, and sat around doing nothing from three p.m. until the first kids started to arrive at the usual time of five or so. I know that's anecdotal, but kids usually don't trick-or-treat early.
2) They claim that this will make it a "longer, stress-free celebration." This makes me think that the copy is written by people who have never had small children and don't realize that, when kids are involved, there is no such thing as a "stress-free celebration," and it certainly doesn't reduce the stress to make it "longer." And how long is it going to be? My town is not unusual in its curfew, restricting all youngsters to home on Halloween after eight p.m.
3) Which brings me to my main point: I firmly believe that most of the people behind this petition are just tired of having to leave the party early on Halloween, or call in sick the next day, or stagger in and try to hide their hangovers. As usual when we're told that things are "for the children," it's actually "for the adults."
4) Who have no standing to change the date of Halloween any more than they do of Christmas or Rosh Hashanah or Eid al-Adha or Diwali. True, Halloween is not itself a religious holiday, but it is unalterably tied to one, and is in fact the day of the Vigil Mass for All Saints' Day, a holy day of obligation in the Catholic church, which falls every year on November 1.
5) And for wacky types for whom Halloween is itself a holiday, they can't move the date either. The day is the day. Which brings us to our last point:
6) IT'S NOT A HOLIDAY! That is, it's not a national holiday. It's not Memorial Day, which celebration was officially moved to the last Monday of the month by the National Holiday Act in 1971. No government offices are closed on Halloween. No official notice is taken of the day at all. As far as the federal government is concerned, Halloween does not exist as a discrete legal entity. So the president can't move it.
I hope that clears up my position on this Halloween business. It would be just another silly petition except that the news media has for some reason piled onto it. Which I suppose could be taken as proof of its stupidity.
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