Halloween lights

Halloween decorations have been sneaking up on me like a masked, knife-wielding psychopath in the woods on a dark and stormy night.

It’s no secret people decorate their homes for Halloween, but the trend seems to have reached a tipping point. I believe it is now at a comparable level to Christmas decorations.

Halloween is easily the no. 2 holiday for retail spending behind Christmas. American consumers spent $12 billion on Halloween in 2023, compared to $957 billion on Christmas. The gap in total spending is huge, but I’m hypothesizing that the decorating gap is rapidly closing.

While there are many published reports that demonstrate Christmas is still the king when it comes to retail spending, the mania for Halloween decorating is observably growing each year. I know Halloween decorations are approaching Christmas levels because I conducted my own very scientific study in which I noticed some weird stuff in people’s yards while taking my morning walks. See? Very scientific.

Honestly, it’s hard not to notice. The size and scale of Halloween decorations grew demonstrably in 2020 when Home Depot began selling “Skelly” the 12-foot yard skeleton. Now there are giant ghouls, ghosts, werewolves, witches, scarecrows and other Halloween favorites adorning yards all over the place.

I began noticing the trend back in the 20-teens with the rise of yard inflatables. They just get more and more ridiculous every year. I saw one this year that was just a leafless tree with what looked like an owl and a racoon on the branches. I’m not sure what that’s all about. Nature is deceptively scary?

My favorite are the giant pumpkins, but that’s because I was conditioned to love giant pumpkins by watching “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” every year during my childhood.

Giant skeletons and inflatable pumpkins aside, what began catching my eye a few years ago were the lights. When people began stringing purple and orange lights on their homes and in their shrubberies a la Clark Griswold in “Christmas Vacation,” I felt we had entered a new phase of Halloween decorating.

This purple light phenomenon has caused my brain to think Halloween thoughts every time I see one of those new LED street lights that shines purplish rather than whitish. I can’t help but think it’s warning me to stay away from that street corner because there’s a killer clown lurking in the storm drain.

In addition to what I have observed with my own eyeballs, I think the real confirmation of peak Halloween home decorating is the return of “The Great Halloween Fright Fight” competition show on ABC with Carter Oosterhouse, among other C-list celebrities. There have been two seasons of this show, the spookier cousin to ABC’s “The Great Christmas Light Fight,” which has been running for 11 seasons now.

The Halloween version debuted in 2014. The world wasn’t quite ready for it, so it was shelved until last year when the Christmas light people revisited the idea and released another season. Maybe for $50,000 in prize money, I’d go all out, too. No word yet when the third season of “Fright Fight” will air. I’m sure it’s a function of Carter Oosterhouse’s availability.

We decorated our yard for Halloween only a couple of times when our boys were younger. It was mostly phony spider webs, styrofoam gravestones, and I think a wire brush black cat (there were so many real neighborhood cats wandering by, I often couldn’t tell the real from our decor.) And when Carlton hosted Halloween parties in the past (theater kids love to put on costumes), we went all out on the back deck with light up jack-o-lanterns and such.

All of this leads me to consider if it’s not time to add an activity to the spooky part of the holiday run from Halloween to Thanksgiving to Christmas and New Year’s. Each year at Christmas, we load everybody in the minivan, go to dinner and drive around looking at Christmas lights. We “ooh and aah” while quoting Mama’s most infamous exclamations, “Look over yonder!” and “Golly Pete!” (I’m sorry, sensitive readers to include such language. I understand this is a family blog.)

The closest we have come to this so far was taking Carlton to a theater friend’s house a few years back to see their haunted yard and garage. They built their own spooky tour for trick or treaters, and it was great fun. One year apparently was enough because we haven’t repeated it.

Since our kids have outgrown trick or treating, this may be a way to soak up the festivities on Halloween night. On second thought, I don’t want to get in my car and have to navigate all the pedestrian traffic in neighborhoods. I once backed into a neighbor’s mailbox trying to avoid little Marios and Pikachus.

I’m curious to know if I’m alone in this or if you, too, have picked up on the explosion of Halloween decorations. I wonder if we have reached the peak, or if like the stock market, we will continue to grow our Halloween lawn ornamentation over time with occasional plateaus and corrections.

There’s no telling what I’ll see when I’m prowling the neighborhoods in the pre-dawn hours next year.