A Crackpot Theory on Halloween Merch

I don't think it's a coincidence that we've embraced autumn while the world burns

I have been very quiet in this space for many reasons, chief among them that  Substack has a Nazi problem and I was like, "Is writing on Substack like hanging out in a Nazi bar? Should I maybe find an unambiguously non-Nazi bar? One that will not charge me $300 a year just because my subscriber list for this hobby newsletter exceeds the vendor's free-user limit?"

And then a smart friend of mine was all, "Hey, you haven't written in forever, what's up with that?" and I handwrung over the Nazi bar, and he was like, "Look, so long as you're not monetizing your newsletter, every click you get is taking money away from Nazis."

This effin’ guy.

I like the idea of costing the Substack Nazi supporters money. Tinkety-tonk, old fruits & down with the Nazis! I'm back!

And what prompted this return? It was an article rounding up Halloween decor published on July 25, 2024. That is a whopping three months before Halloween!

SO WHAT?

Twenty years ago, the National Retail Federation's consumer survey found that the average consumer planned to spend $43.57 on Halloween merchandise, $15.21 on costumes and $14.83 on candy, for a total of $73.61 on Halloween-related purchases. Americans were projected to spend $3.12 billion in total.

The 2023 survey projected American Halloween spend to hit $12.2 billion. That is a nearly four-fold increase in Halloween spending in twenty years. The survey doesn't break out individual spending for merchandise, costumes, and candy, but sums up the total: "Per person spending is also up as consumers plan to spend a record $108.24 each, up from the previous record of $102.74 in 2021."

To recap: Over nineteen years, individual consumer spending on Halloween shot up 40%, and total spending on Halloween has almost quadrupled from $3.12 billion to $12.2 billion. The staggering rise in total spending compared to a relatively modest 40% rise in individual spending can be explained thusly: More people now participate in Halloween-y stuff than they used to. According to the NRF, 73% of people surveyed were going to buy something Halloween-related in 2023, compared to 62% in 2004.

I immediately wondered: In the space of a generation, people got really into Halloween What changed in the past twenty years? 

Halloween as a holiday took off right as the Millennials hit adulthood and leaned into influencing as a hobby. That's also when we began to see the first real, noticeable effects of the climate crisis. American Hurricane season changed in duration and severity, we had floods, droughts, serious cyclones, the highest temperatures on record -- and shrinking seasons.

How do adults sublimate anxiety and regain the delusion of personal agency in their lives? Two favorite coping strategies with proven short-term effects are 1) nostalgia and 2) consumer activity.

We were ripe for the fall-fluencers. It started with Starbucks pumpkin spice lattes -- which were tested in 2003, pushed nationally in 2004 -- and then spiraled out from what we ate to what we wore and what the house looked like. By the time we hit 2019, the tropes of white women grinning out from under their felt hats, swaddled in acres of plaid and popping their legs out to show off the #sponcon Stuart Weitzman over-the-knee boots had grown so commonplace as to spawn the Christian Girl Autumn meme, and in 2022, a New York Times profile of the queen of Christian Girl Autumn, Caitlin Covington.

You could do a bingo card with the autumn signifiers in this picture.

In tandem, retailers began pushing more upscale, tasteful versions of Halloween decor. Target -- which has always been very good about knowing which way the cultural winds blow -- had a multi-year collaboration with designer John Derian, whose nostalgic decoupage aesthetic made the Halloween trays and decorations still hotly coveted; they're now pushing a product category called "falloween" to encourage people to buy things they can envision using through American Thanksgiving, a tactic other mass-market retailers like Crate and Barrel have also employed.

And now, as of August 2, there are Halloween collections available at Ikea, Crate and Barrel, Pottery Barn,  Anthropologie, Home Depot, Target and Walmart.

WHO CARES?

All of us on this fragile, unique blue planet should. 

I love Halloween. I did grow up in a place and time where my Girl Scout troop pulled on our jean jackets over our sashes and went to a pumpkin patch to pick out the perfect gourds every year. I went to graduate school in the part of New York State that has Confederate flags, and apple-picking was a thing we did when it was still cheap. It probably says something about my personality that we have twice as many Halloween decorations in our party shed as we do Christmas decorations. It's frankly awesome and fun to live in a time where my neighbors put up elaborate yard tableaux and I get to be the urban legend who hands out full sized candy bars.

Here I am, Strega Hershey, cooking up a new batch of chocolate bars.

But it is also terrifying to live in a time where every year, we record a new hottest temperature on record. Where every year, more climate scientists give increasingly urgent warnings about how things are going to change if we don't make serious changes to how we live and consume. 

Look, people all over the Internet are connecting the dots.

We can't shop our way back to a planet that is 2.4 degrees cooler, as it was in the 1970s. Adorable ghost-themed glasses will not replace the extra five days of autumn we've lost to rising temperatures. We can be charmed by bat-bedecked throw pillows. But we should not lose sight of why Halloween has become so precious to us -- or whether our attempts to hold on to it with both hands may be helping to hasten autumn’s demise.