Tuesday, August 22nd or Thursday, August 24th. According to the IndyStar’s analysis of past release dates and various leaks online, these are the two most likely dates for Starbucks’ 2024 Pumpkin Spice release. Every year, toward the end of summer, a vast multitude of Americans anxiously await this marker of the beginning of Fall. For many, the most exciting thing about Fall is that it is also so-called “Spooky Season,” the Season of the Witch, the lead-up to Halloween.
Over the course of the past two decades, Halloween has surged in popularity among American adults. Back in 2012, USAToday exclaimed that Halloween had been “hijacked by adults,” citing consumer research that showed the proportion of Halloween costumes purchased for adults (rather than children) had risen from 3/10 to 6/10 in a decade.
USAToday also cited survey data from the National Retail Federation that revealed 71.5% of adult respondents reported they planned on celebrating Halloween that year, up from 52.5% seven years earlier. Data from the National Retail Federation in recent years has shown that, after a pandemic dip, adult Halloween celebration remains as high as it was back in 2012.
Loss of Enchantment
The reasons for the surge in adult celebration of Halloween is multifaceted. Sociologist Linus Owens has identified the ways in which Millennials and Gen Z have had different experiences of adulthood than their parents as a driver for adult Halloween celebration.
As I have argued elsewhere, Americans’ pursuit of new modes of enchantment in a country where the influence of traditional religion has waned significantly is another driver of adult Halloween celebration. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, sociologists and other scholars, interpreting the work of German historian and sociologist Max Weber (1862-1920), often promoted the consensus position that as modernity advanced in the West, enchantment would fade.
In other words, as daily life in places like Western Europe and the United States became increasingly organized by rational, scientific, and bureaucratic principles, the people there would think about and believe in things like magic, religion, and mystery less and less.
Beginning in the last decades of the twentieth century, and especially moving into the twenty-first century, this consensus began to crumble. Scholars and intellectuals began to see evidence that, in spite of increasing levels of secularization and religious disaffiliation in the West, people’s pursuit of magic, mystery, and spirituality persisted.
In the United States, the first decades of the twenty-first century brought compelling survey data that traditional religious affiliation was declining markedly and dramatically. Nevertheless, sociologists, anthropologists, and religious studies scholars noticed multiple ways in which Americans were experiencing enchantment in new ways.
One of Americans’ new modes of enchantment has been the widespread embrace of Halloween. Adult participation in Halloween is less and less entirely directed at creating fun and memorable experiences for children. Now, adults also relish experiencing the enchantment of Halloween: that sense of magic in the crisp Fall air, the feeling that Hallowtide is a time when the “veil is thin,” and the strangely delightful titillation that comes from encountering ghosts and goblins in a movie or in one’s imagination.
Halloween Mania: Buying a Fantasy
Another American mode of enchantment is also increasingly tied up with Halloween. For decades scholars have written about consumption in a market economy as a particular modern mode of enchantment to which Americans are prone.
Ultimately, modern consumerism is a way in which people seek the fulfillment of their dreams and fantasies by buying things. People do not buy simply what they need. They even go beyond buying what would make them comfortable in the most practical sense. People are often consuming to satisfy more nebulous desires.
We want to find a different kind of happiness that is often pitched to us through advertising or the conspicuous consumption of internet influencers or our peers.
This happiness comes, not from having everything one needs and living a perfectly comfortable life, but from living the type of life that our fantasies tell us will be achieved if we were to purchase what we desire. Consumerism is magical. By purchasing consumer products, whether goods or services, we seek to achieve an almost spiritual fulfillment that never quite comes.
For many people, the feeling of Halloween is in large part the feeling of consuming mass-produced Halloween merchandise that is generally cheaply made and imported by the crate-load to American shores. As the percentage of American adults who celebrate Halloween has risen, so has Halloween spending, with the National Retail Federation predicting $12 billion in spending for the holiday in 2023.
About $4 billion of that spending would go toward costume purchases, while another $4 billion would be used for Halloween decorations. Not all spending on Halloween costumes consists of the purchase of mass-produced products put out for the holiday at places like Spirit Halloween or big box stores, but much of it is.
Likewise, nearly all the Halloween decor purchased every year consists of lower-quality mass-produced imports available uniformly throughout chain stores across the US. According to National Retail Federation survey data for 2023, more than three-quarters of those celebrating Halloween planned on purchasing Halloween decorations.
Consumer Frenzy and Meaning Making
The situation on the ground among some of the most devoted Halloween enthusiasts is evident in the dozens of Halloween groups all across Facebook. These groups often have thousands to hundreds-of-thousands of members. Posts in these groups can be few and far between throughout most of the year, but as the summer progresses and North America enters Fall, the posting builds.
Quite a few of the posts in these groups are made by people who share their anticipation of and love for Halloween by memeing about Halloween shopping in national chain retailers, by calling attention to what new mass-produced Halloween decor is appearing on store shelves this year, and by sharing their Halloween purchases. Included in these posts are jokes about “going broke” or overspending on Halloween decor, as well as Halloween-decor-specific varieties of a tried and true joke form about American consumerist life: “my husband/wife is going to kill me when they see what/how much I bought.”
Retailers mentioned in Halloween Facebook groups frequently include beloved discount chains TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and HomeGoods; craft stores such as JoAnn Fabrics and Michaels; big box retailers, especially Target; Cracker Barrel; and, of course, the pop-up Halloween superstore Spirit Halloween.
Shopping as Fantasy Fulfillment
Sociologist George Ritzer coined the term “cathedral of consumption” to describe consumerist retail spaces that encourage and facilitate fantasy-driven and enchanted shopping experiences. And these stores are indeed Halloween cathedrals of consumption. The sheer variety of Halloween goods, many of which are new every year, that only appear for the magical anticipatory period before Halloween, aim to drive Halloween enthusiasts into rapacious consumption.
Particularly telling are the trends that have arisen within the Halloween consumerist subculture during recent Halloween shopping seasons. One in particular that comes to mind is the 2021 Cracker Barrel Halloween wraith.
Halloween enthusiasts on Reddit and Facebook discussed the small number of these lantern-bearing ghost statues each Cracker Barrel country store location received in the lead up to Halloween. They would also discuss calling local Cracker Barrel locations and driving across town or to neighboring towns to get one. Quite a few hit the secondary market, and the craze continues this year, with new designs and new sizes being released each season.
Another trend that has persisted since it began in 2020 in the 12-foot-tall yard skeleton offered every year at Home Depot. Like the Cracker Barrel wraiths, the skeletons have frequently sold out early in the Halloween shopping season. These skeletons have proved so striking that they have often been the subject of memes in Halloween enthusiast social media niches. One particularly popular set of memes feature creative decorators making the most out of their 12-foot-skeletons by incorporating them into Christmas displays. Notably, both of these exemplary Halloween shopping fads arose from the heights of the pandemic.
Contemporary Spiritualities
American Halloween consumerism is an interesting place where two non-traditional modes of twenty-first century enchantment meet. Modes of fulfilling spiritual or existential desires such as consumerism or Halloween celebration are so interesting because they (usually) bear only the sketchiest resemblance to things like attending Mass, gathering for a scripture study, or the forms of worship or prayer commonly considered “religious” in the United States.
Consumerism as a way of pursuing some sort of elusive happiness or fulfillment has drawn critique from Americans from about the time it began to dominate our economy. For now, I will leave it up to others to work out what level of consumerism is harmful or immoral. Whether or not it is any kind of moral justification, I think Americans can agree that we all have a personal understanding of the impulse to chase consumerist desire.
