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Yes, it’s true – Halloween creeps closer

4 min read
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Complaining the holiday season is arriving earlier and earlier every year has become as much a tradition as eggnog, ivy and gathering around the flat-screen for “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

And those who find the annual avalanche of hype and ho-ho-ho to be a bit much could well have a point. The holiday season has been starting earlier, driven primarily by retailers eager to lure shoppers into stores and getting them to spend, spend, spend. The longer the season, the thinking goes, the more consumers will unburden themselves of the loose change rattling around in their wallets and purses.

But Christmas isn’t the only season that has been afflicted by what has been dubbed “holiday creep.” Halloween has become less a discrete day on the calendar than it has a weekslong season, with ghoulish decorations being planted in yards well before the frost glazes the pumpkin, and stores rolling out costumes and other frightful gear when families are wrapping up days at the beach.

So, yes, if you remember the bags of candy landing on store shelves a week or two before Halloween when you were a kid, or the costumes hitting the racks well after you were settled in for a new school year, it’s not your middle-aged mind playing tricks on you. That’s because that once was the case.

Audrey Guskey, an associate professor of marketing at Duquesne University, put it this way: “The sooner you start a holiday, the more you might spend.”

And Halloween has, indeed, become a big business. The National Retail Federation estimates Americans will spend a robust $9.1 billion for Halloween this year, up 8.3 percent from last year’s record-setting $8.4 billion. The average consumer is expected to fork over $86.13, and 179 million Americans will be taking part in one form or another. And of that number, 16 percent plan on going so far as to dress their pets in costumes.

It can be argued “Halloween creep” has crept up on us. Until recently, people “didn’t really realize how big a holiday it is,” Guskey said.

Even as Halloween becomes as much about cash registers ringing as things going bump in the night, it still has a long distance to travel before it dwarfs the amount we spend on Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day. Nevertheless, an expanded Halloween season fills a gap for retailers between back-to-school and Black Friday, and it also fulfills other imperatives outside the marketplace.

Laura Northrup, a community editor for the website The Consumerist, believes that the lavish outlays for Halloween reflect the increasing secularization of our society.

“As people have been less religious in general, they tend to go more crazy (at Halloween),” she said.

Although an industry being built around Halloween is a relatively new phenomenon, its origins go back as far as Samhain, a Celtic fall festival that marked the end of summer and the dormant state of nature. It first gained a foothold in the United States with the arrival of Scottish and Irish immigrants in the 1800s. Organized community celebrations got underway in the 1920s in order to cut down on vandalism and other kinds of pranks. It was in the mid-1940s that the whole notion of children dressing up in costumes, going door to door and chortling “Trick or treat!” came into being. Part of what has fueled the growth of Halloween, Guskey said, is that it’s no longer considered a holiday exclusively for children – adults now purchase costumes and go to Halloween parties.

“In part, it was the gay community that popularized adult dressing up, making the holiday an adult affair and not just ‘trick or treat,'” according to Nicholas Rogers, a history professor at York University in Ontario and the author of the book “Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night.” He added that 65 percent of adults participate in Halloween beyond passing out candy, and there has been a growing number of Halloween-focused costume stores that have emerged.

A Halloween “season” might rub some people wrong the way, but not Carolyn Baltich of Ellsworth. She enjoys this time of year and starts putting decorations out in September.

She explained, “I have so many Halloween decorations, why not put them out there?”

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