The Commercialization of Halloween, Part One: A Mini-Essay

     Although the habit of donning costumes during Halloween festivities hearkens back to the Celtic Samhain ritual of dressing as spirits to ward off evil entities, the contemporary practice arose from twentieth-century traditions fed by a fiercely consumerist society. Where the Victorian Halloween was an adult-oriented celebration featuring divination and fireside ghost stories, the Edwardian version at the beginning of the twentieth century pushed the holiday into the realm of children, where costumes and treats became standard fare.[1] What began as simple, homemade attire consisting of bedsheet ghosts and lacey pixies evolved in the 1920s into burglars, gypsies, and Indians and, with the Great Depression in the 1930s, hoboes; however, the global dominance of World War II during the 1940s dampened Halloween revelries as supplies normally allocated to costumes and parties were diverted to wartime efforts.[2] The close of the war and the rise of an affluent society in the 1950s that created a child-based culture, in turn, elevated Halloween to new heights as the entertainment industry, mainly Walt Disney, released prefabricated costumes that allowed consumer-savvy kids to dress as their favorite characters, including Mickey Mouse and Tinkerbell.[3] As the trend continued in the ensuing decades, children’s costumes became more elaborate and expensive and, as Richard Dick of Castle Blood Haunt Couture highlights, the science-fiction craze of the 1980s revolutionized the marketplace with more realistic masks and screen-accurate renditions of outfits from blockbusters like Star Wars.[4] Yet, the child dominance of Halloween was ephemeral as the 1970s witnessed the homosexual communities of Florida’s Key West, New York’s Greenwich Village, and San Francisco’s Castro District push the costume parades – a longtime tradition in small-town Halloween merriments – into the realm of the adult populace.[5] From the ten-day Fantasy Fest Parade in Key West to the extravagant Halloween Carnaval in West Hollywood, the minority group incorporated the same camp and flair popularized in their drag shows and bars into elaborate spectacles that sparked a renewed adult interest in the holiday, with the number of adult participants skyrocketing from twenty-five percent in the 1980s to over seventy percent at the start of the twenty-first century.[6]

Works Referenced

Bannatyne, Lesley Pratt. A Halloween How-To: Costumes, Parties, Decorations, and Destinations. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 2002.

Horovitz, Bruce. “Scary! Halloween’s Been Hijacked by Adults.” USA Today, October 24, 2012.
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[1] Bannatyne, 51.
[2] Bannatyne, 51-53.
[3] Bannatyne, 53.
[4] Bannatyne, 53.
[5] Bannatyne, 53.
[6] Horovitz.