Halloween is the new Christmas.
It's growing faster, too, in terms of consumer spending. Christmas sales will be 4.5% higher this year than last, experts predict, while sales of Halloween goods will be up 5.4%. The National Retail Federation reckons that Americans will pay a record $3 billion-plus this season on hairy spiders, blowup Draculas and plastic maggots that glow in the dark.
Sound spooky? Kathy Crawford thinks so, but in a good way. She's a manager at the Halloween Club, a store open year-round in Santa Fe Springs that sells an unnerving array of pricey props, including a skeleton impaled on a pointed post, a fake dog that lunges from its doghouse as if to rip your head off and an "industrial wood chopper" with legs poking out one end and "flesh" and "blood" dripping from the other that goes for $2,950.
"Look at the prices -- people buy this stuff," said Crawford, who is greeted by waiting customers when she shows up for work on weekends. "This year, they're going all-out."
Increasingly, adults have been elbowing children out of the way to claim the creepiest holiday as their own. The trend will be pushed to the limit this Halloween because it falls on a Sunday, so the partying can start on Friday and continue throughout the weekend.
Nearly 60% of Americans will participate in the holiday this year and 56% of them will don costumes, according to a poll conducted by shopping center owner Macerich Co. in Santa Monica. Some 21% of the respondents said they planned to outfit their pets.
"It's not one night out of the week anymore," said Scott Krugman, spokesman for the National Retail Federation, the industry's largest trade group. "It's like a monthlong celebration."
Halloween, which started out centuries ago as a festival for the dead, has reinvented itself over the years in the U.S. In the early 1800s, it revolved around homey games and roasting nuts. By the end of that century, young people were taking the celebration into the streets, soaping windows and twisting street signs.
In the 1900s, schools, rotary clubs and philanthropic organizations joined forces to try to instill some discipline. "It seemed as though it was tame by the late '40s and '50s, when trick-or-treating began," said Nick Rogers, a professor of history at York University in Toronto and author of "Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night."
