Why Montana Should Celebrate Halloween In September

Montanans will be celebrating Halloween 2022 this year on an overcast Monday night. Not terrible weather, but October can get chilly depending on the season. This will be my second Halloween in Montana, so I don't have a ton of experience in celebrating the holiday in extreme conditions like some of you.

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I'm sure you can remember trick-or-treating in rain, snow, or when it was cold outside. I can:

What this doesn't tell you is that all the neighborhood kids had to put our Starter jackets on over our costumes once we got outside. Batman doesn't wear a Starter jacket, Mom!

This is but one of my arguments for moving Halloween back into September in Montana. Holiday celebrations are arbitrary, after all. We celebrate several holidays on seemingly arbitrary dates every year:

• the third Monday of January (MLK Day)
• the last Monday of May (Memorial Day)
• second Monday in October (Indigenous Peoples Day / Columbus Day)
• the last Thursday of November (Thanksgiving)

Trick-or-treating in jackets.

Why not move Halloween, a holiday which encourages people to dress up and have fun being festive, to a date earlier in the year when the cold Montana weather wouldn't put a damper on (or sometimes dictate) our costumes? If we did that, we'd also have to address another big part of Halloween...

We Wouldn't Have To Wait For The Pumpkin Harvest

Halloween coincides with the annual harvest of the pumpkin, one of our favorite veggies ever (well, "favorite" in that kids aren't expected to eat this particular vegetable year-round, at least.) It's a beautifully-timed coincidence, since we use pumpkins for jack-o-lanterns.

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If we moved Halloween to the end of September, couldn't we just use plastic or some kind of pumpkin analog for our spooky decorations? Vegetable farmers might hate me for this but we have fake Christmas trees, why don't we use fake pumpkins? You know the yearly cycle of real trees during the holidays:

• buy your tree, get it home
• drag out the boxes, decorate it
• hope the cat doesn't knock it over several times
• put the decorations back in the boxes after Christmas
• recycle the tree

The trade-off is worth it to some: spend money on the analog instead of doing all the work yourself.

If Halloween in September wouldn't allow for more real pumpkins, pre-cut fake pumpkins could replace them and save us some time. At least the whitetail deer wouldn't be as tempted to eat them right off your front porch.

At the end of the day, celebrate Halloween how you want, when you want. We don't make the rules.