There have been quite a few words rumbling around in disagreement about what day on which to properly celebrate Halloween. And if you take a passive sentence like that at face value, you are probably content to follow The Badger Herald Editorial Board’s advice to “let Halloween fall where it may.”

As always, there is more here than meets the eye. While the so-called debate about the thirty-first and the first is tantamount to heckling over the date of the equinox as the seasons go right on and herd in and out at will, the Herald’s suggestion surreptitiously covers an underhand plug for making Friday an epicenter of sorts.

“This year, Oct. 31, Halloween, falls on a Friday,” the board writes, “and crowds of costumed revelers should be expected on State Street to enjoy the holiday on its rightful date.”

Rather than hedge about what are and are not Halloween’s birthrights, which might demand citations from pagan scholarship, I suggest ending this rubbish about anthropomorphic holidays.

Halloween has become, for college students, something much different than the way they used to celebrate it: toting bags of candy and crazy getups from door to door on the last day of October. The transformation is not so unlike the way that practice evolved from mystic ancient European rituals and counter-rituals.

After last year’s mass masquerade turned sour, I described the intent of the party this way: “Halloween in Madison is really a celebration of State Street … [the holiday] is just another demonstration of college camaraderie. We suited up together and we liquored up together and we invited friends from other campuses to our beautiful street. By the end, we had pulled a mask over the whole scene. That, of course, is what it’s all about, somewhere buried in the muck and mire of violence. We covered the street in illicitness.”

If the Octoberness of it all seems far away, that is because it is. Halloween, the way it’s championed in Madison, has no more rightful date than Thanksgiving or, say, the Mifflin Street Block Party.

The calendar is a cue, ensuring we don’t end up costuming in August, but the party essentially goes down when it goes down. Okay. So where did this need to name the date come from? And how did The Badger Herald, in pointing out the silliness in this, succumb to it?

Last fall, Oct. 31 was a Thursday. The year before it had been Wednesday, the year before that Tuesday, before that Sunday. Each of those years students partied the preceding Saturday, having collectively and unconsciously discovered Saturday was the best day to party.

But Oct. 26 simply seemed a little too early to fill the streets with our bacchanalia and half of campus was about to have a nervous breakdown wondering whether it would be all right to do Halloween in November. So last fall the newspaper nodded its approval and the controversy ended.

Until the riots. For their own prediction-addled reasons, Madison’s police had expected the largest celebration Thursday night and were unprepared for the calamitous events of Nov. 2.

At first the city pointed fingers, claiming The Badger Herald incited violence by directing students away from the night of heaviest enforcement. But eventually the cops lauded us for being in touch with the student mentality and, largely because of this, changed its program for this fall from one restricting student revelry to one designed to foster the celebration and encourage safety.

Through a joint committee of city administrators, community leaders and students, and thanks to an informal band of students who organized entertainment, a design including mass costume contests and live music all afternoon grew for Saturday, Nov. 1.

With the trail blazed last year and the end of October even nearer the later weekend, there did not seem any need for another clarification from the editorial board. No one, after all, was planning to party a weekend early.

But the Herald apparently viewed the prepared music and festivities as a step toward officialization and took the opportunity to stick it to the grown ups by propping up Friday.

I applaud the scrutiny and, indeed, it’s not a bad instinct. All the sanctioned fun has a chance to produce an atmosphere very unlike the illicit Halloween we are all accustomed to.

But, optimally, Saturday — even city-approved — is the prime day for the kind of raucous character that gives Madison’s Halloween party its identity.

State Street swells with masked jubilee specifically because tens of thousands of friends from campuses up and down Wisconsin and across the Big Ten flood in for the unique experience. Because of Friday classes or the plain demands of transportation, these visitors are always best prepared for a Saturday showdown.

This is not merely convention, ripe for the bucking. By now, Saturday has become a more important part of Halloween than the 31 itself, just as trick-or-treating has become replaced by heavy drinking.

Thursday and Friday become sort of ignition days from which the Saturday celebration derives its explosiveness. In pointing out, “this is Madison, after all,” The Badger Herald is right on in understanding that students here will drink all through the weekend. You will probably wear your Arnold Schwarzenegger mask, your Outkast outfit or dress up like the gang from “Old School” all three nights, won’t you?

But this board doesn’t know Madison as well as it thinks if it expects the hallmark celebration — the one with potential to erect memories and tear the street apart — to come off any night other than Saturday.

Lars Russell ([email protected]) is a writer living outside New York City. He sat on the Halloween Planning Committee before leaving Madison. He is the artist behind the comic strip Laredo and was editor in chief of The Badger Herald last year.