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CELEBRATING HALLOWEEN
ALL OCTOBER LONG |
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 October
8th - While driving through town today my wife and I noticed
that seven homes had already decorated the outside of
their houses and their yards for Halloween.
Later, when we stopped
for lunch at our favorite Chinese restaurant, we saw a mom
and her two young daughters at the buffet, both of the girls
were wearing orange Jack O' Lantern t-shirts and little
pumpkin stem tiara's. I took a few minutes to complement her on
letting her children dress for Halloween so early in the
month. She told me that it was both her and her kids
favorite holiday.
While October
31st. will always be the official date for celebrating
Halloween and the climax to this spooky holiday, every year
we see that it is being honored starting earlier in
the month of October. For decades we
have started our
festivities on October
19th. with our "The Thirteen Days of Halloween"
festivities and
begin
decorating our home inside and out. While we have always
decorated the inside of our house starting on October 1st
with a few Halloween decorations, the past couple of years
we've gone all out and put up as much as the house would
hold. This year we decided to start adding some early decorations
outside as well.
Retail &
Business
 Seasonal
brick-and-mortar stores such as Halloween Express, Spirit Halloween
and Halloween City appear at the beginning of the month
offering a huge selection of related merchandise and
many department stores, market retailers and arts & crafts
stores start stocking their Halloween products as
early as the last week of August. In fact, by the second
week in October some of these stores are almost sold out of
Halloween merchandise! Michael's Arts & Crafts gets in one
shipment of Halloween and seasonal merchandise and when it's
gone, that's it. You'd think they would catch on and in
order to keep sales up, bring in more shipments.
Owners of the
Costume Kingdom online
costume store
told us that
every year more and more people are ordering their costumes and accessories earlier
in the month as well. Not only does this give the customer
time to make any exchanges if needed, but it also brings in
more revenue for the company. With the economy as bad as it's been Halloween all but fell
from sight after the 2008 election. It seems to be making a
come-back this year!
Even non
Halloween related businesses are decorating their
storefronts early in the month these days and more are allowing or even
encouraging their employees to hold a
Halloween office
party. They are having professional window painters come
in and decorate their front windows with Halloween themes
and the store owners themselves are decorating earlier
inside their shops.
Halloween
Attractions
 Large
amusement
parks like Knott's Berry Farm, Universal Studios, Six
Flags and Cedar Point transform themselves into haunted
versions of themselves after hour Friday through Sunday
starting in September and running through Halloween. Some of
them make the bulk of their yearly profit during this time.
You'll also see several hundreds of smaller haunted attractions
pop up in cities and smaller towns across the
country that typically run every weekend or even every night through out the
month, some are now even opening there creaky, cobweb
covered doors in September. Some are done by charity
organizations but the bulk are done by people that love
Halloween and love to scare people. What may have started
out as a small home haunt has now turned into a rented
property that run 1,000 or more people through in a night.
They are opening earlier and earlier every year.
More and more
family owned farms are creating
corn field mazes and offering haunted hay rides at night
that can get pretty intense.
Pumpkin patches,
both real and temporary are becoming more entertainment
orientated, setting up children's rides and games, haunts
for adults and carnival games and food for people of
all ages.
Live Oak Canyon Ranch in Redlands, CA is both a pumpkin
and Christmas tree farm. During September and October they
have gone from being a place to cut your own pumpkins off
the vine to a full blown pumpkin patch and carnival with
rides, shopping, food, petting zoo and more.
Entire towns
such as Salem, Massachusetts and
Anoka, Minnesota celebrate
Halloween all month long. There are quite a few towns that
claim the title of "Halloween Capital of the U.S.", there
are at least 10 that do and they all have their good points.
It would be nice to take a week long trip to visit one city
after the other. Some cities can truly claim that the title
of "Halloween Town Extraordinaire" but you can only have one
Capital!
Entertainment Industry
 Horror movies
are often released in theaters during the month of October and
many television
stations air horror movie marathons and Halloween themed
specials weeks before or even all month long. In addition to AMC's yearly "Fear
Fest" of horror movies, they are launching their third season
of the extremely popular zombie apocalypse series "The Walking Dead" on October 14th.
this year.
While the
Chiller Channel is horror 365 days a year, they really ramp
things up during the month of October including some great
specials like "Can you Survive a Horror Movie?".
They offer day long marathons of horror films all week long
right now and we've seen some that we had never even heard
of that were very good, so check them out if you pick up the
Chiller channel. You
can always count on the History Channel to air their
wonderful documentary "The Haunted History of Halloween",
both the original and the up-dated versions. There are lots
of "The Haunted History of" programs on this channel during
October. You'll find vampires, werewolves, real life
witches, ghosts and other interesting shows there. Also
check out the Travel Channel for lots of haunted America
shows, highlighting different towns and places across the
country that are know for haunted places.
Since 1997,
TBS (Turner Broadcasting) has aired the classic Christmas
movie, "A Christmas Story" in a twenty-four hour marathon,
over December 24th. and 25th. We would love to see them do
the same, running the original John Carpenter's Halloween and
Halloween II movies back to back on October 31st.
In closing, we
at Halloween Online believe that the days when this was
once a one night bash are over and it is quickly
becoming a month long extravaganza! Yippee!!
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