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 Our
Featured News articles will cover Halloween items from all over the
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interesting Halloween news can be found here. We'll try and keep up to
date with new Halloween industry news as we find it. |
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Halloween is boo!(ming)
Saturday, October 14, 2000
By Jack Broom
Seattle Times staff reporter
From the seven-foot-tall wooden cat in the pumpkin patch to
the 2,200 lights hanging from the roof, the Ballard house of Martin and Colleen Lysness is
ready for the scary season.
The display has made the Lysness home a magnet for
treat-seekers. Last year, they used a hand-held clicker to count 740 visitors from 5 to 10
p.m. Halloween night, some arriving by bus.
Each year, the couple not only add to their own decorations,
but see more of their neighbors starting or expanding Halloween displays. Said Colleen
Lysness, 42: "Ballard is getting into the spirit."
It's not just Ballard. Across the country, Americans are
expected to spend $6.8 billion on Halloween this year, up from just more than $5 billion
last year, according to the National Retail Federation. "The baby-boomer generation
has grown up now, they have children now and they have great memories of Halloween,"
said Mary Helen Sprecher of The Halloween Association. "They're too old to go out
trick-or-treating, but they're not ready to let go of the fun."
Candy ($2 billion) and costumes ($1.5 billion) remain the
biggest Halloween money-makers. But Halloween decorations are making great gains.
According to one estimate, $659 million was spent on Halloween decor last year, a 53
percent boost in a single year.
"Halloween decorating used to mean you bought a
pumpkin," Sprecher said. "Now people are buying stuff that lights up or screams
or twitches or blows smoke."
No less a cultural authority than Martha Stewart confirms the
Halloween habit, hitting the newsstands with a special issue devoted entirely to
Halloween. (You can slip into a fairy godmother gown made from more than 100 coffee
filters, or knock back an "eyeball highball" if you don't mind a couple of
frozen radishes peering back at you.)
Locally, Halloween joins Christmas as the big seasons for the
display business, said warehouse manager Karl Hoffmann at Display & Costume, with
stores in Seattle and Everett.
Display & Costume is doubling its work force to cope with
the demand for plastic ghosts, rubber rats, screaming door knockers, witches on
broomsticks and hot new items such as the battery-operated "Bungee-Jumping Spider of
Doom."
In addition, this season the company opened it first
Halloween-only temporary outlet, two miles from its Everett shop, partly to compete with
seasonal Halloween shops in the malls.
No surprise that boomers helped heat up Halloween. Through
sheer numbers, the post-World-War-II generation has been the most dominant marketing
target of the past half-century. Dual incomes and fewer children than the previous
generation add up to more disposable income.
But experts see other factors at work:
Young adults, following the boomers, are seeking (if not
spoiling) their "inner child." The retail association's survey shows 65 percent
of those 18 to 34 plan to put up some Halloween decorations this year, compared to 57
percent of adults as a whole.
The robust economy undoubtedly is playing a role. "That
never hurts," said Hoffmann, "when you're dealing with a product no one
absolutely needs."
Halloween displays and parties bring neighbors together, a
sort of "take back the night" effort in which, ironically, scary creatures help
foster neighborhood security.
The World Wide Web offers an explosion of possibilities for
ordering merchandise or getting ideas. HalloweenMagazine.com, for example, leads to
Halloween recipes, decorations you can make, poetry, a safety quiz and more.
For most people, Halloween doesn't carry many obligations,
such as the gift wrapping, card sending and pageant attending that can crowd Christmas
schedules.
"Christmas has become so hectic, people see Halloween as
a chance just to have fun." said Michael Cahalan, area manager for Spencer Gifts. In
addition to its permanent stores, Spencer operates several "Spencer's Halloween
Headquarters" stores in the Seattle area and owns the "Spirit Halloween"
chain of seasonal outlets.
Adults are indulging themselves by carting off major pieces
such as "Mr. Gravely," the $250 hunchbacked, five-foot-tall butler Donna Root of
Renton purchased at Spencer Gifts at Southcenter this year. He'll lean against a wall and
hold a brass plate of goodies for visitors.
Root also picked up a $130 skull, about two feet tall, to
stand under a black light on the porch. And those are just the most recent major
acquisitions in a growing collection. "It's for the kids, but I guess I'm still a kid
at heart," said Root, 47, mother of four, grandmother of two.
Christmas remains the mother of all holidays in terms of
money changing hands. Halloween is gaining ground as a decorating occasion, but the big
bucks at Christmas are in gift-giving, on which Americans will spend an average of more
than $800 apiece, according to a recent survey.
Lysness believes that Halloween decorations are helping the
holiday recover from a lull about five to 10 years ago, when safety concerns curbed
trick-or-treating for many children.
Now the kids are back, often accompanied by parents, making
the evening more of a family outing than just a dash for a sugar high.
The Lysness display, at Northwest 71st Street and 32nd Avenue
Northwest, has put the house on the route for some Halloween evening tours, pushing the
couple's candy budget past the $150 mark.
Not only are people putting up more decorations, they're
putting them up earlier. In Wallingford, Joe Jucha, 63, had his jack o' lantern of lights
on the gate, and assorted ghosts, tombstones, witches and strings of lighted pumpkins in
place before the end of September. "I just like colored lights," he said.
In Renton, as Root adds pieces each year to her ghoulish
graveyard, she admits, "I've kind of gone bonkers on it. My husband thinks I'm a
little bit insane."
But last year, Root talked her husband into joining the show.
He lurked around in a Grim Reaper outfit while a fog machine spewed white
puffs from a bush. The Roots' daughter has posed as a witch, stirring a cauldron of dry
ice.
"I've got props that look like people and people that
look like props. The little kids can't figure out what's what," Root said.
Root's unscientific observation on the Halloween decor
trends: "Just drive around. Each year you see more people have decorations up."
It takes about four days for Root to put up her indoor
display and get it just so. But she waits until Halloween afternoon to set up the outdoor
stuff and brings it all back inside at the end of the evening. A few years ago when
someone walked off with pieces from her Christmas display.
Not everyone shopping for Halloween decor is taking it home.
An increasing number of workplaces are getting into the act.
At Display & Costume, customer Stefanie Warren, 26,
filled a shopping cart with black-light fixtures, garlands lined with bats and jack o'
lanterns and a big cutout skeleton. The Seattle consulting firm she works for decided to
invite a group of school kids in for a Halloween visit and gave Warren a budget of $500 to
$1,000 for decorations and treats.
Even as she notes Halloween is getting more attention these
days, Warren hesitates to speculate on the societal cause.
"Maybe," she said. "It's just any excuse for a
party."
Copyright
© 2000 The Seattle Times Company
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Every
year, Halloween enthusiasts anxiously await the retail
industry to begin their Halloween season and see who's
first to stock products for the spooky season. Many
stores begin stocking Halloween products as early as
July! |
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