It’s not your imagination.
Just like those 8-foot skeletons, Halloween is getting bigger every year in Abilene and across the nation.
The National Retail Federation’s annual Halloween consumer survey revealed that total Halloween spending in 2025 is expected to reach a record $13.1 billion.
Halloween spending has increased more than 250% in the 20 years the federation has been tracking it.
That’s quite a treat for retailers.
The rising popularity of the day is evident in all the giant skeletons, ghouls, witches, spiders, scary pumpkins and cobwebs that already bedeck cities days before Oct. 31.
While for years Halloween was primarily a trick-or-treating occasion for kids, its rapid growth in popularity is due in large part to adults.
Fast Company, a business media company, reported a survey showed that 70% of adults celebrate Halloween and shell out a lot more money than kids do.
“Like treats snatched from a trick-or-treat bag, adults have slowly been stealing Halloween from kids for years. Now it appears, grown-ups own the holiday,” USA Today reported back on Oct. 24, 2012.
Halloween had its origins in distant Celtic times, but its more modern incarnations started as a festival to include all saints and martyrs to happen on Nov. 1. The night before became All Hallow’s Eve, or Halloween for short.
A history of Halloween by the New York Public Library said early European settlers in American originally carved out turnips and placed candles inside to ward off evil spirits. Later, Americans switched from turnips to pumpkins.
Candles in turnips.
That was $13.1 billion ago.
This article originally appeared on Abilene Reporter-News: It’s beginning to look a lot like Halloween
Reporting by Lynn Walker, Wichita Falls Times Record News / Abilene Reporter-News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
