This year, Haverhill will observe Halloween on Oct. 31.

You might ask, 'Doesn't it always?' No. Usually, it doesn't.

In the last 13 years, this is only the second time that Haverhill will celebrate Halloween on Oct. 31, the date on which everyone else observes the holiday. By a fluke of the calendar, the last Saturday of the month coincides this year with the holiday's actual date. The last time that happened was 1998.

In 1996, the City Council decided that in Haverhill, Halloween would be celebrated on the last Saturday in October. Call it Haver-ween, if you will.

There were reasons, of course. These were the days when Daylight Saving Time would sometimes end before Oct. 31, so scheduling trick-or-treat on the last Saturday of the month would virtually guarantee that the city's children would not be out begging candy in the dark.

And then there was their education. A weeknight trick-or-treat trip could result in tired children in school the next day, thanks to gallivanting around the neighborhood in all that fresh air, followed by a sugar rush.

A third issue was crowd control. Councilors argued that the Saturday hours would limit the number of participants in trick-or-treat. Saturday trick-or-treat created additional doorstep visitors who enjoy candy collecting in their own towns on the real Halloween, and visit Haverhill for the unique Haver-ween holiday.

A practical reason, at least for working parents, is that 5-to-7 p.m. trick-or-treat hours during the workweek can create a frightful scheduling problem.

The council has been asked to reconsider its Halloween ban a few times since its 1996 inception, but the Saturday hours have continued to stick.

This year, because of the serendipitous collision of Halloween and Haver-ween, the question is raised again: When should Haverhill celebrate the holiday?

Mayor James Fiorentini has made it the topic of his regular e-mail survey.

The police chief and top officers in the department have been talking about it, too. They prefer trick-or-treat on the actual holiday.

A special Haver-ween plus the real Halloween mean two days' worth of extra shifts for Haverhill officers.

In these days of razor-thin staffing levels and questions about where money is going to come from to pay officers' regular salaries, a singular Halloween makes a lot of sense for the city's overworked budget.

To us, the best reason of all is that there simply is no such holiday as Haver-ween. Halloween is Oct. 31. The calendar says so. Haverhill should just go along.

A challenge to candidates: Get creative on recycling

We applaud Mayor James Fiorentini's decision to expand the single-stream curbside recycling pilot to upper Main Street and Bradford.

Every pound of trash diverted from the waste stream is money saved by the city in costs to incinerate it at the Covanta plant.

Haverhill lags other cities of its size in the types of waste it picks up curbside — it is the only city in the region not to offer full curbside recyling of all recyclable materials. Except for the two pilot project areas, Haverhill picks up only recyclable paper.

We agree, too, with challenger John Michitson that the time is long overdue for the city to offer full single-stream curbside recycling.

The vagaries of the local, regional and national economy make it difficult to discern which of the candidates is closest to accurate in his financial estimates of how much it would have cost or saved the city had expanded recycling been available a year earlier.

The fact that the Tuesday recycling pilot has shown some success is proof that Haverhill residents are ready to recycle more than just paper.

Rather than arguing about who wanted to do what when, we challenge both mayoral candidates to come up with creative ideas to increase the city's recycling rate.

For example, in Salem, Mass., the city has implemented a competition among its various neighborhoods to pick up the recycling pace.

The city's contractor, Northside Carting, is tracking how much recyclable material is put out at the curb each day, and the route (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.) showing the most improvement in a quarter will have a tree planted in the neighborhood.

Last week, Salem and Northside officials were scheduled to visit a street in the Wednesday collection area to plant a tree in recognition of the 2.3-percent improvement in that neighborhood's rate over the previous quarter.