Orange Beach and Talladega city officials are embracing separate Halloween plans that have one thing in common: They both land on Saturday, October 30, this year and not Sunday, October 31.
“Studies indicate that celebrating Halloween on Saturdays is often less stressful and more fun,” said Talladega City Manager Seddrick Hill Sr. “Most people can celebrate longer because they don’t have work or school the next morning.”
Added Orange Beach Mayor Tony Kennon, “It doesn’t conflict with Sunday church services on a Sunday or a Friday night football game on a Friday, and you are also taking it off on a school night. For us, it always made sense that a Saturday night was much easier on everyone than a school night.”
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The two cities are like a host of others in Alabama that will celebrate citywide trick-or-treat traditions one day before All Hallows’ Eve.
But the shift might not be a one-time deal as other cities, including Dothan, vow to review shifting trick-or-treat traditions each year.
A national movement is afoot to celebrate “National Trick or Treat Day” (NTTD) during the last Saturday of October.
‘Focus on safety’
The concept is the brainchild of the Halloween & Costume Association (HCA), a non-profit trade association of businesses aimed at promoting the holiday.
In 2018, the group started a petition calling on then-President Donald Trump to add an additional day of festivities occurring on the Saturday before October 31, thus the creation of NTTD “so families across the country can participate in community parades, throw neighborhood parties and opt for daytime trick-or-treating.”
Aneisha McMillan, spokeswoman for HCA, said the petition initially received 60,000 signatures, and is now up to over 150,000. The idea, she said, is not to eliminate Halloween as a holiday but to possibly add a second day to allow for greater safety and daytime trick or treating.
In an email to AL.com, she provided some statistics and noted that “children are more than twice as likely to be struck and killed by a car on Halloween than any other night of the year.” She noted that 82% of parents do not use high visibility aids on costumes and 63% of kids do not carry a flashlight. Another statistic: Among children under 5, 12% go trick-or-treating without an adult.
“We wanted to focus on safety and the daytime trick-or-treating adds the benefit of visibility,” said McMillan. “We never set out to take away anyone’s Halloween, we simply have the goal to make it bigger and better. NTTD is just an additional day to celebrate Halloween.”
At least one professor who studies Halloween and horror films is concerned about a growing narrative that Halloween activities are “unsafe.”
Michele Ramsey, an associate professor of communication arts and sciences and women’s studies at Penn State Berks in Reading, Pennsylvania, said that most of the fears about Halloween are irrational and unfounded including the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 90s, and allegations of candy sabotage that was mostly driven through media hysteria in the mid-80s.
The candy poisoning scare, that resonated with Generation Xers during their childhoods, did not produce one incident of a child dying from contaminated candy.
“What’s troubling about all of this is that we’ve now taken a perfectly safe tradition and created an air of danger around it that does not need to exist,” said Ramsey, who teaches a course titled, “Rhetoric of American Horror Films.”
There is some indication that trick-or-treating could see a resurgence this year compared to a year ago when coronavirus fears hovered over Halloween.
An Axios-Ipsos poll taken last month showed that 68% of parents surveyed see little or no risk in trick-or-treating this year, compared with 51% when we asked this question last October. Six in 10 adults see little or no risk to trick-or-treating in their community, a 15-point jump from last October.
Ramsey added, “Trick-or-treating is a great community tradition that actually helps us feel safer and happier in our neighborhoods and it feels like we are destroying it a little every year with the ‘safe’ Halloween options that aren’t even necessary. I really wish folks would move away from talking about ‘safe’ or ‘family’ Halloween activities, which presumes that traditional means of celebrating Halloween are ‘unsafe’ when we have no substantial evidence that they are.”
‘Severely diminished’
The effect has been a rise of more trunk or treat events hosted by churches and other community groups. In Montgomery, a popular “Spooktacular” event hosted by the Sheriff’s Department will draw thousands of children to the Garret Coliseum, during a drive-through event where children do not have to get out of their vehicles to get treats from 40 to 50 different vendors.
In Mobile, trunk or treat activities continue to grow in popularity as traditional trick-or-treating wanes in some neighborhoods, according to Lawrence Battiste, the city’s director of public safety.
“I buy trick-or-treat candy and in the last five years, only five people have come to my door for Halloween,” Battiste said. “I try to participate in other activities that are put on the city or the churches and the trunk or treats. It’s a safe way to get out there (and celebrate Halloween). A lot of parents, because they do that, are not doing the trick-or-treating that, as a boy, I remember growing up and having.”
Ramsey said the rollback of traditional trick-or-treating – replaced with “trunk or treat” events or trips to shopping centers and malls – shifts the focus of Halloween away from the neighborhoods.
“So what have we lost?” Ramsey asked. “One of our only community-wide events is now severely diminished.”
She added that the loss occurs from the following:
Family: Time spent with caregivers enjoying the outdoors and fun of Halloween with their kids being reduced to going to “very specific houses and events deemed ‘safe.’” Rather than a night of “unbridled fun” in their own neighborhood like adults experienced as kids, today’s children often leave their neighborhoods for “safe” spaces “that aren’t needed and aren’t any safer than traditional trick-or-treating.”
Streets: A move away from the shared spaces in a community, where “we take turns walking in a specific space, let others go first to a house, practice social etiquette and neighborly behavior with community members.”
Community: Halloween spending means big bucks in the U.S., with an estimated $6 billion spent annually on the day, making it the country’s second largest commercial holiday after Christmas. Ramsey said that decorating houses and giving away candy allows her and others to meet neighbors and learn their names, as well as the names of their kids. She added, “We become a community, even though I live on a relatively busy parkway. How else do we get to engage with our whole neighborhoods, even those homes without children in them?”
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