Halloween Is the Last Night of Sober October

There's an unkind joke buried inside Sober October, and it tends to become obvious somewhere around the third week: the month ends on Halloween. Thirty days of accumulated momentum, and the finish line has been laid down on one of the most reliably drunk nights in the calendar.

It wasn't always arranged that way. Halloween spent most of its modern life as a children's evening, and somewhere in the last couple of decades it grew a parallel adult version built almost entirely around parties. That version has a particular quality that makes it harder than an ordinary night out: everybody is dressed as somebody else. The whole premise is a temporary suspension of who you usually are — charming in most respects, and awkward when the thing you have spent a month doing is being consistent.

The specific trap on the thirty-first is arithmetic. You have done thirty days. The month is, in every sense that feels true at six in the evening, already finished. One night at the end of it looks like a rounding error, a technicality nobody would hold against you. The trouble is that the thirty-first is the month. It's the last day of the thing rather than the day after it, and the version of you running that calculation at six o'clock is not the version who has to sit with it on the first of November.

Here is the part that's genuinely good news, though. Halloween is one of the easiest parties of the year to attend sober, for a reason that has nothing to do with willpower: everyone is looking at the costumes. The attention in the room is on the spectacle, not on what anybody is holding. At a wedding or an office party your glass is a visible fact about you that people read and occasionally comment on. On Halloween it's set dressing.

Hold something anyway. A glass in your hand does almost all of the social work by itself — it answers the question before anyone thinks to ask it, and it stops you being offered a drink every twenty minutes by someone being kind. What's in the glass matters considerably less than the fact that it's there.

If there are children in your life, the trick-or-treating version of the evening is an unusually good one to volunteer for. You're occupied, you're outdoors, you're walking, and you're home by nine with the whole thing behind you. Not every difficult night comes with an exit built into it. This one does, and taking it isn't avoidance — it's choosing the version of the evening that fits what you're already doing.

The last thing is worth settling before the thirty-first rather than during it: what the first of November is. For some people the month was a month, and it ends. For others it turned into the beginning of something, and Halloween is just a night somewhere in the middle of it. Either answer is a fine answer. But eleven o'clock at a party, three hours in, is the worst imaginable moment to work out which one you are — and if you've already decided, that conversation never has to happen at all.