With the fall of the leaves comes that rite of autumn: Halloween. The holiday, celebrated on October 31 can be traced back to the Celtic festival of Samhain (“sow-in”) celebrated in Ireland, Scotland, and parts of modern day Britain and Europe. It marked the start of winter, when, it was believed that souls and spirits could pass between the earth and other worlds more easily.
The first recorded celebration of Samhain can be traced back to a bronze calendar engraving from the 1st Century B.C.E., Jackie Mansky writes in the Smithsonian Magazine . People disguised themselves by using animal skins and heads to evade identification by spirits. In the old days, the time of year was also considered particularly conducive to prophesising. Over the centuries, the festival began getting Christianised. All Saints Day, a day dedicated to Christian martyrs and saints, started being celebrated on November 1 (instead of May), in the eighth century. Halloween is celebrated on the eve of this “All Hallows’ Day”.
The modern variant of Halloween, as it is celebrated in the U.S., was brought by immigrants (particularly from Ireland) to these shores in the 19th Century, according to research published by the History Channel. In the late 1800s, there was a push by community leaders to make the holiday community-focused and the religious and superstitious aspect of Halloween had mostly vanished by the turn of the twentieth century. Today the holiday is celebrated with children wearing costumes going “trick or treating” in the neighbourhood, amassing candy, people carving pumpkins to make jack-o-lanterns... and costume parties. Even the President celebrates Halloween with an annual party for staffers and their families. This year, with a President who has a penchant for converting nearly every event into a campaign event, the party had a controversial twist. Yahoo reported that there was a station where children were given the opportunity to use pieces of paper that resembled red bricks and put together a mural that had “Build the wall” written across it, a reference to President Donald Trump’s rallying cry of building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.
Cashing in on the spirit
Halloween is, however, not typically about the political. But it does involve money. The National Retail Federation (NRF), a retail association, which put out its Annual Halloween Spending Survey in September, had expected this year’s average spend per shopper to be $86.27, or a projected total of $8.8 billion — marginally lower than last year’s $9 billion. If projections were on target, some 172 million people would have celebrated Halloween this year, down by three million from 2018.
Almost all Halloween shoppers buy candy ($2.6 billion projected expenditure), roughly two-thirds would have bought costumes ($3.2 billion), and roughly a third would have bought greeting cards ($390 million) as per the survey.
In terms of costume, princesses, superheroes and Spider Man topped the charts for kids. As for adults — some five million ‘witches’, two million ‘vampires’ and 1.8 million ‘superheroes’ were projected to have prowled around the streets of America over the last few weeks.
Halloween is clearly not just for humans — some 29 million people were projected to have dressed up their pets this year. Approximately 9% of pets would have been dressed as pumpkins as per the survey. Interestingly just over 3% of pets were dressed as cats — one can perhaps assume the pets getting the costumes were themselves not cats. Were they dogs? The data do not say.
Apart from the interesting window it provides into people’s psyches, Halloween shopping and costumes can also provide insights into areas such as social media use and, in a limited way, views on international trade. The NRF notes that 14% of those surveyed said their concerns about the economy would impact their Halloween. Halloween & Costume Association executive director Michele Buggy told NBC News in October that nearly every round of tit-for-tat tariffs between China and the U.S. had impacted the industry. Large retailers do not want to raise prices and want the manufacturers to take the tariff hits, Ms. Buggy, whose association represents 50 manufacturing companies, said. Shipments of Halloween-related merchandise from China have diminished, according to an October 30 report in The Washington Post .
Halloween has survived wars, illness, technology and the centuries. It has spread worldwide. Trade wars will come and go, booms and recessions too. But if history is anything to go by, Halloween will go on.
Sriram Lakshman is The Hindu’s Washington correspondent
