Technically a holiday is defined as a day of festivity and recreation when no work is done.

In North America and beyond Halloween is commonly referred to as a holiday these days.   The “and beyond” part comes from the numerous references to Halloween I saw in Japan when I was there recently (mostly marketing based though).   There are holiday greeting cards for this event and of course retailers have jumped on the band-wagon leveraging it a great marketing ploy.

Maybe it’s just semantics

In some way’s I am a bit of a stickler for a strict meaning of words.  Halloween is definitely not a day of festivity and recreation when no work is done,  so calling it a holiday is just wrong.

Granted people dress in costumes, collect candy (children mostly) and other practices some strange rituals and customs which have come to be associated with the last day of October – so there is some festivity – but a holiday it is not.   People do go to work on Oct 31st (unless of course it is a scheduled day off work for other reasons like a weekend or whatever).

A time for pranks

As a youngster I have fond memories of dressing up in costumes and going door to door begging candy.  Sounds routine, until I clarify that our gang did this any time of the year (not just on Oct 31st) and surprisingly sometimes we did get candy (not always though).  The point is though we saw no need to wait for a phony holiday to practice this ritual which did have some benefit for us.  We just saw no reason to treat trick or treating as a time sensitive practice.

On the trick side, another favorite, not just reserved for Halloween was where we filled a bag with dog excrement, lit it on fire, placed it at a door step and rang the doorbell.    It was really funny when I was thirteen but seems like immature behavior to me now.   (I guess the young have less filters about what constitutes acceptable behavior)

Holiday or Not

Happy Halloween Everyone!!