How Many Days Until Halloween? 17 Days Left on Oct. 14

Anything that has to travel by mail is now working against a clock. Halloween is 17 days away, on Saturday, October 31, leaving twelve weekdays, five weekend days and two Saturdays.

Two and a half weeks is the last comfortable window for anything that has to be sent rather than bought locally.

Working back from the delivery date

Halloween falls on a Saturday, so the final delivery day is Friday, October 30, and that day is heavy for every carrier. Two weeks is a reasonable buffer for domestic ground service and the point at which the risk of a late arrival begins to climb. Priority services buy two or three days. Anything crossing a border needs longer than that, and a package posted in the final week of October usually arrives in November.

The rule that saves embarrassment is simple. A Halloween gift should arrive before Halloween, or it should not be sent as a Halloween gift. An item that lands on November 3 is a fine present and a failed holiday gift, which makes the mailing date more important than the item.

Packing so it arrives whole

Rigid outer boxes protect. Padded envelopes do not, and anything that can be bent will be. Fill the empty space completely so nothing shifts when the box is shaken, because movement is what breaks glass and ceramic. Put the address inside as well as outside, since an unreadable label is the most common reason a parcel disappears.

For a gift box that has to survive a sorting facility, mail the components flat and let the recipient assemble them. Tissue paper never arrives the way it was packed, and thirty seconds of arranging at the other end produces a better result than any packing method.

What to send instead of a card

Cards are the fastest-growing category in the National Retail Federation’s numbers, rising to 42 percent of shoppers from 38 percent a year earlier, and they are also the cheapest way to make a mailed gift feel deliberate.

For a Halloween box, a note matters more than a card. Something that says what the item is and when it was sent gives the recipient a reason to keep the packaging, and a box that gets kept becomes storage for the thing that came inside it.

One date still belongs on the calendar. If the gift is for a teacher or a colleague whose event falls on October 30, send it to arrive by the twenty-eighth. Arriving after the celebration is the same as arriving late.