Halloween is the one night a year we're all allowed to be someone else. Maybe you're a pirate alongside your kids, giddy at the door with a bucket of candy. Maybe you're cranking the playlist at a Halloween party with your closest friends. Or maybe you're a total stranger at a bar, dressed as something wildly far from your day job.
This year, the night is better set up than usual. Halloween falls on a Saturday, so there are no school-night curfews, no early alarms, and no cutting the fun short. And then there's the bonus: when the clocks fall back at 2 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 1, everyone gets an extra hour.
There’s a bonus hour this Halloween
The extra nighttime hour, caused by the end of daylight saving time, brings a few extra perks this year.
An extra hour to change your mind. Maybe you're still on the couch at 8 p.m., wondering whether to honor that party invitation. The bonus hour gives you room to decide. Pull the costume together and show up fashionably late, or settle in guilt-free. "Too late to go out" doesn't kick in until much later this year.
An extra hour on the town. For anyone out and about, the bonus hour means one more round, one more photo, and one more "wait, who are you supposed to be?"
An extra hour to sleep in. The best part is the next morning. Whether you were up late with a sugar-high kid or dancing in a wig, you wake up with a bonus hour of sleep. Consider it your reward for committing to the character.
How rare is this?
Halloween lands on a Saturday only about twice a decade, and when it does, it lines up with the end of daylight saving time. That happened in 2009, 2015, and 2020, and it's happening again this year. After this year, the next one isn't until 2037, an 11-year wait. If you've been holding back on the costume, this is your sign.
So lean into it. Be the kid, be the DJ, be the mysterious stranger. You've got an extra hour to enjoy it.
Alexa Erickson Gage is a California-by-way-of-Maine writer, editor, and content strategist who covers interior design, travel, lifestyle, and beauty. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Thrillist, Fodor's Travel, BuzzFeed, Martha Stewart, and more. A lifelong content curator, she also runs @living_by_lex, where she shares design-forward destinations, bougie hotels, one-pan recipes, effortless fashion edits, and vintage-meets-modern home decor inspiration.
