The Skarry Skelly 2025 Halloween Message

Hey kids, Halloween is here again, if you can afford it. And time for some more of dad's insights on life, if you can stand it. Trick or treat!

J ob growth is stalled, inflation is back and creeping steadily higher, the Federal budget deficit is soaring, domestic spending is growing but at a disturbingly slow pace, nobody knows what's going on with Trump's tariffs or whether they're even legal. Business investment and research spending are both kind of on hold, as companies cogitate interest rates, trade policy uncertainty and general economic caution. Congress is AWOL. God only knows what's going to happen with medical costs over the next twelve months, not to mention what the future of vaccines is going to be.

But the stock market? Scaling new heights left, right, center and almost every other day it seems.

What's going on? Who the hell cares? Food prices might be plunging you into despair, but apparently it's a great time to be rich. And wealthy holiday consumers show little inclination to pull in their horns for this Halloween. Holiday-related spending is expected to be jumping, just like candy consumption and adult parties. (As you know, Halloween isn't just for kids anymore. Just check out costume sales.)

As of late 2023, the wealthiest 1% of earners held more wealth than the entire U.S. middle class. And ironically their enthusiasm may just be contagious. Rising prices or no, a full 73% of American consumers confirm they're in a party mood this Halloween. Not so wealthy? That's what credit cards are for. (Credit card debt reached an all-time high of $1.21 trillion in the second quarter.)

Halloween spending should hit an all-time high in 2025: $13.4 billion (with a "$b") according to the National Retail Federation’s annual consumer survey (conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics). That's up from $11.6 billion last year and the previous $12.2 billion record set in 2023.

While there's a certain amount of uncertainty hanging over the economy's long-term growth prospects, the Atlanta Fed's "GDPNow" model was recently "nowcasting" 3.3% annualized growth for the third quarter, matching the second quarter's performance. (First quarter was -.5%.) That would be pretty good considering what's going on, but that could also prove a little optimistic. The Philadelphia Fed's "Third Quarter 2025 Survey of Professional Forecasters" projects a slightly more conservative growth figure of 1.3%. But that's higher than their previous projection.

GDP could actually get an ironic boost from Trump's tariffs. Imports are down; see if you can guess why. Import sales are a subtraction in GDP calculations. People could wind up buying more domestically produced stuff and less from overseas markets. But if domestic sales and foreign sales should both turn down, that might send a worrisome message about both our GDP and our future. Right now, though, car sales and housing starts are both on the rise, suggesting fairly robust sustained growth, for now.

We'll see. But meantime, whatever happens, your Halloween costume is going to cost more. And don't try to save money by waiting and buying late on sale. Halloween sales started earlier than usual this year. Delay and you could find yourself looking at empty shelves.

Dad's advice would be to try and get rich as soon as you can. Or you could, maybe, stop paying your student loans and hope they lose your file. It happens.

On the local front, neighborhoods around the Panhandle started decorating for Halloween earlier than usual this year. Usually a good sign for the economy. Oversize (10-15 feet tall) skeletons, zombies, chain saw murderers and grim reapers are a hot new trend here, punctuating lots of front yard displays, making for a positive if disturbingly themed economic indicator.

Consumers are expected to spend $1.4 billion this year on costumes for their kiddies, $2 billion(!) more on costumes for themselves and then another $0.86 billion on costumes for their pets.(!!)

Have fun tonight, guys. Dress responsibly and try not to scare your signficant other. Also try not to engage in any hate speech, which is defined as any speech the President happens to hate. You could wind up in El Salvadore, where your costume might be misunderstood.

Love, Dad

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Halloween Through the Years: A Timeline
Ancient Times: Halloween Begins as Samhain
Celts believed that the barrier between the physical and spirit worlds was breachable during Samhain. It was expected that ancestors might cross over during this time as well, and Celts would dress as animals and monsters so that fairies were not tempted to kidnap them.

10th Century: Samhain Gets Christianized
In the 7th century, the Catholic Church established November 1 as All Saints' Day, a day commemorating all the saints of the church. By the 9th century, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, where it gradually blended with and supplanted older Celtic rites. In 1000 A.D., the church declared November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead. It’s widely believed today that the church was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, church-sanctioned holiday.

The All Saints’ Day celebration was also called All-Hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints’ Day) and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called All-Hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween. ("Hallows" is Gaelic for Saints")


The Middles Ages: Trick-or-Treating Emerges
In England and Ireland All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day celebrations included an early form of trick-or-treating they called "souling." Poor people would visit the houses of wealthier families and receive pastries, called soul cakes, in exchange for their promise to pray for the souls of the homeowners’ dead relatives. The practice was later taken up by children, who would go door to door asking for gifts of food, money and ale.

19th Century: Jack-o-Lanterns Take Shape
Carving faces into vegetables became associated with Halloween in Ireland and Scotland around the 1800s. Jack-o-lanterns originated from an Irish myth about a man nicknamed “Stingy Jack,” who tricked the Devil and was forced to roam the earth with only a burning coal in a turnip to light his way. People began to make their own versions of Jack’s lanterns by carving scary faces into turnips or potatoes and placing them into windows or near doors to frighten away Stingy Jack and other wandering evil spirits.

19th Century: Halloween Comes to America—and with It Mischief
With the exception of Catholic-dominated Maryland and some other southern colonies, Halloween celebrations were limited in early America, which was largely Protestant. In the mid-19th century new immigrants—especially Irish fleeing the Irish Potato Famine—helped popularize Halloween nationally.

The immigrants celebrated as they did in their homelands—which often included pulling pranks. Common Halloween tricks included placing farmers’ wagons and livestock on barn roofs, uprooting vegetables in backyard gardens and tipping over outhouses. By the early 20th century, vandalism, physical assaults and sporadic acts of violence were not uncommon on Halloween.


1930s: Haunted Houses Become a Thing in the US
Haunted or spooky public attractions already had some precedent in Europe. In the 1800s, Marie Tussaud’s wax museum in London featured a “Chamber of Horrors” with decapitated figures from the French Revolution. In 1915, a British amusement ride manufacturer created an early haunted house, complete with dim lights, shaking floors and demonic screams.

By the time of the Great Depression in America, violence around Halloween—no doubt exacerbated by dire economic conditions—had reached new highs. Parents, concerned about children running amok on All Hallows' Eve, organized “haunted houses” or “trails” to keep them off the streets.


1950s: Halloween Costumes Go Mainstream
Costumes and disguises had figured into Halloween celebrations since their earliest days. But it wasn't until the mid-20th century that costumes started to look like what we know them as today. Mass-produced costumes became more affordable in the 1950s, and more kids began to use them to dress up.

Around the time neighborhoods began organizing activities to keep kids safe and occupied, costumes became more important (and less abstract and scary). And take the form of characters from popular radio shows, comics and movies. In the '50s, mass-produced box costumes became popular, and trick or treaters began to dress up as princesses, mummies, clowns or more specific characters like Batman and Frankenstein’s monster.


1970s: Fears About Poisoned Halloween Candy Reach New Heights
While in general the fears about poisoned Halloween candy have been overblown, crimes involving poison have occurred. The most infamous case took place on October 31, 1974 when a Texas man gave cyanide-laced pixie sticks to five children, including his son. The other children never ate the candy, but his eight-year-old son did—and died soon after. The paranoia reached new heights in the early 1980s after a rash of Tylenol poisonings in which cyanide-laced acetaminophen was placed on store shelves and sold. After the Tylenol murders, which are still unsolved, warnings about adulterated Halloween candy increased.

1980s: Halloween Becomes a Holiday for Grownups
This shift can actually be traced back as far as the 1970s, when Halloween street festivals in several gay U.S neighborhoods began to transform into adult parties featuring lavish and over-the-top costumes.

In the mid-1980s, the Coors Brewing Company ran an ad campaign featuring TV horror host Elvira. It helped make the ghoulish night a “beer holiday” in the mold of Super Bowl Sunday and St. Patrick’s Day. Today Americans buy enough Coors beer at Halloween to increase seasonal sales by 10 percent.

Capitalizing on the party mood, retailers began pushing theatrical costume offerings: pin-up pirate, naughty nurse, even sexy Big Bird. Skimpy Halloween get-ups have long been available but in the last decade but now the prevalence of sexy costumes has exploded, according to Lesley Bannatyne, author of “Halloween Nation: Behind the Scenes of America’s Fright Night.”

Why the desire to flaunt so much skin for a celebration that comes around just when temperatures are taking a downward turn? “Whatever box you’re in, Halloween is when you get out of it, and for some, sexiness or outrageousness is their expression of getting out of it,” Bannatyne says.

(Sources: The History Channel, CNN)

Sue Mantz is an unhappy pumpkin