Halloween Commentary

I echo the sentiments found in this commentary from PennLive.  Luckily, for us, trick-or-treat night was on Halloween last year and will be this year as well.  I also wish trick-or-treat night was 4 hours long, not just 2 hours.

Commentary: Setting Halloween should be a treat, not a trick

Published: Friday, August 10, 2012, 9:04 AM     Updated: Friday, August 10, 2012, 9:05 AM

By Allison Dougherty

I spend a lot of time in municipal board meetings for the newspaper. School district meetings, too, if we’re going to start counting. I’m sure there are those who attend more, but I’m right up there near the top of the list.
This would be a little strange if it wasn’t a job. If it wasn’t a job, The Patriot-News would probably publish an article about the woman who has been seen at as many as 10 local government and school district meetings in a month. You probably wouldn’t read it.
But I digress.
Some of the meetings to which I go are exciting, really, and some are nothing short of mind-numbing. But, hey, every day isn’t Christmas.
I hear a lot of odd things at the meetings. Here is the oddest thing I hear, and I’ve heard it around this time of year — I know, it’s August — about a bazillion times every single year for going on six years: “When’s Halloween this year?”
Huh?
We’re not talking Memorial Day, which slides around the end of May with disconcerting mobility. I never know the date of Memorial Day. This is Halloween. Halloween is on Oct. 31 every single year, not the fourth Thursday-Wednesday-Sunday of the month, or any other day the keepers of the calendar in the Harrisburg area have selected.
I would’ve written that last sentence in capital letters, but the newspaper editors who slog through my dyslexic text every week would have changed it, so I’ll repeat for emphasis:
Halloween is on Oct. 31, every single year.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is time to take back our holiday from our local officials. Call your council members, email your supervisors, let’s work together and reunite trick-or-treat with Halloween.
No more Oct. 31s spent staring at the clock like a pretty girl without a date for prom while the rest of our country’s citizens wear witch hats and goblin masks and ring doorbells.
We have a window here.
According to Lemoyne Borough Council Member David Beasley, the Capital Region Council of Governments, which usually recommends a night for trick-or-treat — do not get me started on that — decided municipalities could work with their school districts to select their own dates for trick-or-treat this year.
School districts? Are these people really masters of timing? I’m not being hurtful when I point out, at least in my school district, these are the folks who, for my teenage son’s four years of high school, had me dropping him off at 7:20 a.m. to make his first class. Enough said.
No school districts. No municipalities. Us. Get on the phone with your local government officials before a date is set, please. This, gentle readers, is a call to freedom. You have their numbers. 