Stop celebrating Halloween before October

Spooky season should be confined to only one month.
Illustration: Max Lopez • *The Sentry*

It’s a sacred event, it doesn’t need over a month

Anyone who’s anyone can appreciate the mass’s love for the spookiest of seasons, even if they don’t much care for it. Halloween is simply a beloved time of year. The lights, the costumes, the pumpkins, a perfect storm of old-fashioned spooky fun. A time of year that refuses to be tainted. Yet, earlier and earlier every year the ghouls, goblins, and spectres seem to creep into the back nine of the summer months. For this reason, it’s time to avoid a culturally premature Halloween celebration.

Surely skeptics of this piece have already turned the page, but those still reading are invited to consider for a moment that Halloween is no longer Halloween when it happens earlier. As summer turns to fall, the month of September hardly concludes when the cold sets in and the leaves once again fall to the earth. The period before this hardly fits the aesthetic qualities of the season. No one considers the night of Sept. 15, when the colors of autumn have not even reached the trees and not a single windbreaker, cardigan, or sweater has left the confines of the closet.

Remember finding that perfect costume two months before the actual night of Halloween? No? It likely never happened, and acting otherwise just feels wrong, like a certainly wrong place and time.

Fanatics of the season are painfully aware that it only comes but once a year. This may provide temptation to strike preemptively, but does this action not invalidate what makes the season so special? If Halloween lasts from the end of August all the way to Thanksgiving, does it even happen? Does the spirit of the haunt live long enough in the hearts of costumers, trick-or-treaters, and spooky devotees to last through the lifespan of a goof Hallow’s eve, or does it simmer before even making it to the cursed 31st? Is there even enough spooky media to last more than an October’s worth of viewing? Maybe so, (depending on how many Friday the 13th sequels were made), but can this cycle be repeated year-in, and year-out?

This most soul-stirring time of year deserves better than that. One month, (plus a couple days after for the last-minute shindigs, reluctant removals of decorations, and 70 percent off candy at the nearest convenience store), contains the perfect amount of time to hit all the best haunted houses, the perfect number of “Spooky Scary Skeletons” replays, and the perfect allotment of trips to Spirit Halloween.

The October air is chilly but not too chilly to warrant an especially dense jacket. The sun sets early enough for dusk to roll in before bedtime, but late enough to catch an amber-tinted afternoon sunset. Most importantly, it warrants the perfect amount of occasions to wear an overpriced or time-consumingly crafted costume to make it worth the effort, but not before the thing comes apart at the stitches. So long as it doesn’t get worn again next year.