Petition To Move Halloween Off of Oct. 31 Gets over 80,000 Signatures
Depending on your love of sweets and spookiness, Halloween is either an annual forgettable blip or your personal Christmas.
Regardless of your feelings towards the quasi-holiday, everyone should be able to agree that it should be made as safe as possible for everyone, right?
One person is aiming to address some of those safety concerns with a radical new idea that is rapidly gaining steam on petition.org.
The petition creator is pushing for Halloween to be on the last Saturday of October as opposed to October 31. Much like how Thanksgiving operates, this means that Halloween would never be on a set date in October.
The petition creator, “Halloween & Costume Association,” cites safety concerns as the primary impetus for this potentially jarring change.
“It’s time for a Safer, Longer, Stress-Free Celebration! Let’s move Halloween to the last Saturday of October!” the top of the petition reads.
The creator then rattles off a variety of stats meant to, fittingly, spook you. While the creator doesn’t cite a source, it claims that there are 3,800 Halloween-related injuries every year, with parental negligence and bad safety practices being the primary culprits.
On its face, this seems like a massive, and possibly unnecessary, change.
After all, Halloween isn’t a federal holiday. It’s not one of those annual events that generally gets family members to travel. As mentioned above, to many people it’s just a blip on the calendar.
There’s also the issue of why Halloween is when it is.
As is the case for many commercialized holidays, people appear to have forgotten why Halloween immediately precedes November 1.
Also known as All Hallows’ Eve or All Saints’ Eve, Halloween originated as a celebration on the eve of All Hallows’ Day, which is November 1. Moving Halloween to the last Saturday of October would undermine the original premise of Halloween.
That’s not to say that moving Halloween to the last Saturday of October is a completely meritless idea.
Would it be more convenient to have Halloween on Saturday as opposed to a school night? Certainly. Would it help parents become more actively involved with their children and help them be more safe? Maybe.
According to WFAA-TV, the original goal of the petition was 75,000 signatures.
As of publishing, the petition currently sits at over 80,000 signatures and appears to have a new goal of 150,000 signatures.
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