The Horror, the Horror: Halloween has grown into a big deal — too big

National Review, Nov 10, 2003 by Meghan Cox Gurdon

One morning about this time last year I stopped at a coffee shop. The line moved peacefully along, until it was my turn to order. "What'll it be?" said the fellow behind the counter, still looking down at his cash register. "A chocolate croissant and a cup of -- Aah!" I yelled. The man had raised his head and was looking at me with yellow goat-eyes. ". . . a cup of coffee, with milk," I finished, shakily. He was, of course, wearing special-effect contact lenses. But I had forgotten that it was almost Halloween, and, as far as my atavistic self was concerned, I had just gazed into the eyes of a monster. For a split second, it was terrifying.

Forget soaring rates of obesity, bankruptcy, and out-of-wedlock births: By far the scariest statistic about contemporary American life is that people now spend more on Halloween than on any other "holiday," apart from Christmas. We spend with abandon even when in the slough of national despond: In October 2001, with Ground Zero still smoldering and the country questioning whether it would ever laugh again, Americans still bought over $6.9 billion on tubes of fake blood, plastic pumpkins, and ghoul costumes. Heaven knows what the wallet- letting will be this year.

"Mummy, look! A circle of ghosts!"

The children are straining against their seatbelts in excitement as we drive past the most egregious manifestation of Halloween's new prominence: home decorating. Until the last five years or so -- and I can't imagine what happened to change things -- most Americans confined their Halloween celebrations to an orgy of candy-giving and -eating. But for whatever reason, the zeal to adorn homes with satanic images seized the national imagination. Lo, people began spiking witch hats and upside-down witch feet into their lawns to make it look as though a cauldron-stirrer had erred in her flight path and crashed straight into the ground.

"Over there! A giant spider web! Wow!"

We drive past a pretty white center-hall colonial festooned with plastic bats. A gruesome hanged man made of stuffed clothing swings from the limb of an oak tree. I speed up and hope the ardent young hearts behind me won't notice.

"Wait, Mummy, they've got a graveyard in their yard!"

I dread this time of year. It's not that I oppose the wearing of charming costumes by young children. My son Paris's outfit when he was five still ranks among the world's dearest. He wore a dark-green turtleneck (which he already had), dark-green trousers (ditto), and on to these we stapled cardboard lightning bolts covered with aluminum foil. He was the only electric eel in a class full of store-bought Pokemons. Nor do I question the rightness of shoving barrels of salt- water taffy down young throats. Goodness knows, I like a sugary tidbit on occasion, and my children can imagine nothing nicer than a sack of individually wrapped Snickers bars to eat all on their own.

What gets my sacrificial goat is that Halloween isn't about anything. It's not about death, or life, or fall, or The Fall, or family, or patriotic love of country. It is a completely content-free, dark-caped, sugar-frosted bacchanal in a society that already, every day, gives people license to be content-free, sugar-frosted, and to dress however gothically they like -- and that includes children.

The fact that I lost this battle when the children entered nursery school may explain my acidity. But when I was a girl, Halloween didn't involve obligatory full-school parades, pre-trick-or-treat parties for parents in fancy dress, or coffee jockeys with caprine contact lenses.

Halloween was a low-grade thrill experienced chiefly by the very young. We made costumes with the contents of our dress-up trunks, assembled our school-distributed UNICEF boxes, and marched out into the dusk to petition the neighbors for coins and sweets. Rumors abounded of men who slipped razors into apples, so we avoided mansard-roofed houses. We'd come home, sort the candy by category -- hard, chewy, and crunchy -- try to trade away those wax-paper-wrapped maple-nut toffees, and go to bed.

Now Halloween is epic-length, parents pay a fortune on mass-produced costumes, and the celebrants who spend most, oddly, fall in marketers' coveted 25-34 age range (the age more of partying than parenting). Through cunning marketing on the part of stuff-producers, and a dismaying weakness in the American character for stuff-buying, Halloween now "represents the beginning of a new season, not just one holiday," according to Tracy Mullin, president of the National Retail Federation. Spider rings! Frankenstein windsocks! Decorative skull lawnbags with twist ties! Every year there's more, and every year it arrives on the shelves a little earlier.

A scene from not so long ago: I am pushing a shopping cart filled with my children through a Connecticut supermarket. It is lovely outside, hot and sunny. We are wearing bathing suits under our clothes.

"Look, Mummy, candy!" Paris, six, crows, pointing to a monstrous heap of chocolates wrapped in black and orange foil.