The Halloween Saturday Night Massacre
by D. Trull
Enigma Editor
dtrull@parascope.com
Perhaps it's only fitting that Halloween, the one holiday that celebrates weirdness and oddity, should occupy so twisted a position in our social consciousness. All Hallow's Eve has withstood the onslaughts of small fretful minds that imagined the dark hand of Satan guiding the procession, and attacks from sick bastards who conceived of hiding razor blades inside candy apples. But through it all, the spirit of Samhain has endured, nay, thrived. Even though it's not an official holiday and is largely considered to be for kids, Halloween has surpassed Thanksgiving and Valentine's Day as the number two annual occasion for festivities and consumer spending. Not too shabby for an ancient pagan observance.
Even so, Halloween is not impervious against the schemings of its sworn enemies. The latest threat is a devious one: a misguided attempt to dislodge Halloween from its place on the calendar, thereby robbing it of all its rich heritage and meaning. The culprit behind this affront is that formidable titan in the realm of date-reckoning, the Farmers' Almanac, which has launched a campaign to move Halloween from October 31 to the last Saturday in October.
Now folks, that is just plain wrong. How can you possibly have All Hallow's Eve not be the night before All Hallow's? There is no way that anybody who loves and respects the true spirit of Halloween would ever support such a crazy and half-assed idea as this call for grass-roots action that the Farmers' Almanac has dubbed its "National Halloween Crusade."
So why in the world do these lunatic crop-rotation consultants want us to move Halloween to Saturdays? You can read all about it on the Almanac's web site, which outlines the incomprehensible "family-fun" motives behind the crusade. The site also provides a handy fact sheet that distills the major points of the crusade's dubious argument into bite-size chunks. I present this document in full below, to give these Almanac people the opportunity to explain themselves:
Moving Halloween To The Last
Saturday Of October Will...
Make it safer: More parents could accompany their children, help them with traffic, and guide them to the homes of people they know. There would be more daylight as Halloween would fall during daylight saving time the majority of the time. There's less work-related traffic on Saturdays.
Make it more of a family day.
Give working parents more time to participate in Halloween celebrations.
Eliminate missed school-night bedtimes.
Remove some of the religious connotations of the holiday's origin (it would no longer be associated with all Saints' Day).
Encourage more participation at community parties/events.
Allow for more opportunities to sponsor alternate events for communities not wanting to promote trick-or-treating.
Because no federal or state laws establish the date of Halloween, no laws need to be passed or amended to initiate this change. Instead, altering the observance to the last Saturday in October would be a grassroots campaign that could start with city and county councils, and perhaps even classrooms.
Oh, the humanity. Each and every word of this empty-headed treatise sears my flesh like a thousand daggers of fiery hot steel laced with ebola-ridden maggots. Only a full uninterrupted week of listening to NPR could equal this much concentrated politically correct feel-good crapola. I really do want to vomit.
This moronic travesty will surely fail to change Halloween in any decent, right-thinking community, but that assurance is no excuse to stand idly by. This offense must not go unanswered. The time to act is now.
The Farmer's Almanac web site has furnished a pre-written letter of support that would-be Halloween movers can copy-n-paste and send to their local mayor, town council, school board members and other hard-working public servants whose time gets wasted by mindless busybodies. That was a pretty good idea, so I'll provide a pre-written letter of protest that you, as a faithful guardian of the Halloween tradition, can copy-n-paste and send to the Farmer's Almanac via e-mail or to this address:
National Halloween Crusade, c/o Farmers' Almanac, Box 1609, Lewiston, ME 04241.
All set to copy, paste and smite this foul menace? Then let's begin:
Dear Farmers' Almanac,
It is with great interest that I have learned of your organization's National Halloween Crusade, which proposes to move our country's favorite autumn celebration to the last Saturday of every month. I feel compelled to respond that I find this idea foolish, ill-conceived, and without merit or justification on any grounds whatsoever, and I shall not rest until your petty efforts are utterly and permanently destroyed.
While I duly respect your concern for the welfare and safety of children at Halloween, moving the holiday to Saturday will in no way benefit our youngsters. Nowadays most kids in my community do their trick-or-treating at the local mall, and Lord knows that place is more dangerous on Saturday nights than any other time of the week. The kids who do get to venture door-to-door usually have to quit at sundown, and they're back home sucking down Twizzlers while Wheel of Fortune is still on -- so I doubt it throws their school-night bedtimes that far out of whack. Plus, one of the best parts of Halloween is getting to wear your costume to school all day, and I ask you to imagine all the extra strain placed on working parents if they were forced to dress their kids up for school Halloween and Saturday Halloween. Oh, pity the poor martyred working parents!
But now let's move on to what's really got me pig-biting mad about this whole Saturday night switcheroo: anybody with the cognitive reasoning faculties God gave a jack-o'-lantern knows good and well that you can't just go sliding Halloween all around the calendar like it's Suddenly Susan on the Must See TV lineup, by jiminy. Halloween is when it is. It will be where it's at. It cannot be changed. It cannot be reasoned with. Halloween is like unto a force of nature. You might just as well try to re-book an appointment for a category-5 typhoon. Like it or not, October 31st is the day when Hurricane Halloween comes a-knockin'.
As you mush-brained almanac hawkers have apparently forgotten, Halloween is about more than finding a excuse to solicit free sugary junk from strangers. It is a strange and mystical interlude marking the end of autumn and the gloomy passage into the black heart of winter; it is an in-between time, blurring the boundaries between the earth and the ethereal, between living and dead, when wayward souls and evil spirits from beyond are loosed upon the material world to roam unbound. Now, do you seriously think all those evil spirits will agree to stop by on Saturdays instead, just because there's less traffic out, and the PTA would like to hold a nice banquet supper that night at the Sizzler? Hell, no! You people have the gall to say we ought to remove those nasty old "religious connotations" of Halloween's origins? Well, folks, I'm for putting them back where they belong! Those ghosts and demons are gonna be running buck wild on the 31st, ready or not, and who knows what castastrophe might befall us if we're waiting around till Saturday to perform the proper rituals that ward off their sinister deeds, by thunder!
Yeah, yeah, lots of holidays have been moved around before for the sake of convenience, but so what? The latest one was that bonehead decision to combine the proud American traditions of Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays into that meaningless communist invention called President's Day, and nobody asked my permission to do that, by gum. At least we don't have to worry about George and Abe's ghosts coming to whoop our butts if we don't observe their birthdays at the right time.
Who the heck do you think you are, anyway? "The Farmers' Almanac"? Just because you track the phases of the moon and crap, you think that gives you dominion over time and space to dictate the date when there should or should not be Halloween? Yeah, right. C'mon, you guys aren't even the real Farmer's Almanac -- the one everybody thinks of is the Old Farmer's Almanac, which has been around since 1792. Your "Farmers' Almanac" is just a second-rate ripoff that's only been around since 1818. Losers.
Mark my words: mess with Halloween, and you will rue the day you reap the bitter harvest you sow. And you can take my October 31st Halloween from me when you pry my trick-or-treat bag from my cold, dead fingers.
Sincerely,
A Concerned Halloween-Loving American
Source: The Farmers' Almanac web site. Special acknowledgement to the inspirational writings of Ed Anger.
© Copyright 1998 ParaScope, Inc.
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