An Extra Hour of Halloween Daylight? Thank the Candy Lobby
By Jennifer 8. Lee

When many of us were little, trick-or-treating didn’t start until the sun had gone down. That’s happening an hour later this year, thanks to the extension of daylight saving time into November.
City Room was convinced that the conspiracy theory that Halloween was a critical part of the Congressional debate to extend daylight saving time was one of those questionable Halloween myths, like razors in apples or pins in candy.
Not so. City Room should learn never to underestimate the weirdness of the city to our south. Turns out, senators were truly concerned about that extra hour of daylight and its impact on children’s pedestrian safety, going so far as to propose a Halloween Safety Act (various studies show that kids are significantly more likely to hit and killed on Halloween than any other day).
But it gets even stranger than that. The candy lobby also played a significant role in pushing Halloween into daylight saving time, believing that extra hour of trick-or-treating in daylight would spur more candy sales but arguing that it would decrease deaths, according to Michael Downing, the author of the Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, an amusing book at the myths and realities behind daylight saving time.
(One of the historical points he makes that it was Wall Street bankers, and not farmers, who were the primary advocates for the clock-tinkering at the start of the last century, as they wanted to eliminate an hour overlap with the London markets’ trading day.)
The candy lobby has a long history with Halloween and “saving” daylight. By 1986, a year of great Congressional debate on the matter, candy sales had suffered a sharp falloff as trick-or-treating was hammered by:
Hysteria around the myth of candy poisoning
Increased concerns about child abduction brought on by photos of missing kids on milk cartons.
“The candy makers were so desperate for this that besides lobbying for years, they went and put pumpkins filled with candy on the seat of every senator in America,” Mr. Downing said.
The lobbying effort, which was allied with the retail and sports industries, was unsuccessful that year and every year until 2005, when it piggybacked on the Energy Policy Act and managed to get daylight saving time extended by a month.
But the candy makers’ impact can be seen in the odd way the month is broken up: three extra weeks in the spring and one in the fall, just enough to cover Halloween. “That one week is a simple concession to the long-suffering candy makers and chocolate manufacturers,” he said.
City Room mentioned in passing how the Fire Department of New York was running a “change your clock, change your battery” campaign that chides people to change the battery in their smoke alarms twice a year, when the time changes. (This year, the time change happens at 2 a.m. Sunday, which means an extra hour of sleep, or an extra hour of weekend fun, as the case may be.)
Mr. Downing then added, “The ‘change your battery in your smoke detector’ was an ad campaign designed by a battery company.” (Indeed, Energizer and the fire chiefs came up the campaign 20 years ago.)
The battery companies “got themselves associated with safety,” he said. “That’s what the candy makers are trying to do with trick or treating.”
More likely, we suspect, dedicated trick-or-treaters will just wait until the sun sets — in the New York region, that’s 5:54 p.m.

Prof Clare: in his own words

On men: "I see middle-aged men, who gave their lives loyally to this company or that corporation, ruthlessly put out to grass. Their children have flown and their spouses are otherwise occupied. It is the women who now play the golf, who have jobs and friends at work. It is the men who cower in the empty nest."

During the 2002 abortion debate: "The overwhelming majority of abortions on Irish women are carried out for social and economic reasons. Those who powerfully demand that women should have the right to choose to abort their unborn babies should not enrol psychiatry or psychiatric justifications for their cause."

On Freud : "A religious prophet speaking in a secular language."

On psychoanalysis: "The most stupendous confidence trick of the century."

"Full-time psychiatry would kill me. It's very draining and giving. People who are psychiatrically unwell are very demanding."

On smacking his eldest child: "I had a short fuse and psychiatry has forced me to lengthen it."

© 2007 The Irish Times

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