DIANE MAKAR MURPHY Billions spent on Halloween? Now that's scary

Sales of Halloween stuff have hit the $2.5 billion mark. No, no, I didn't make a mistake. I wrote two-and-a-half BILLION dollars!
How did an occasion that a scant 30 years ago featured kids dressed in clothes they found in the attic end up a megabucks holiday?
Two-thirds of adults are going to dress up tonight, a recent survey shows. Not only that, Halloween is now second only to Christmas in the sales of decorations. Ninety-one percent of 800 people surveyed by Cleveland-based American Greetings said they decorated for Halloween in some way. More than a quarter brought ready-made decorations.
Bah, humbug! When I was a kid, the decorations came from the local elementary school, where we annually created construction paper pumpkins.
On the porch sat a big, fat jack-o-lantern that some creepy older teen would steal at the witching hour and hoist into the road. In a chair next to it was "Sam, Sam, the Garbage Man." He was a dummy we made each year of old clothes stuffed with raked leaves.
Dressed to the nines
The big costume at our house was the "bum" outfit. It featured dad's old pants, the rattiest shirt we could find, an old hat, and, the big extravagance -- a bubble-gum cigar. Come on! That was fun stuff.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, EVER bought a complete costume. If you wanted to be Superman, your mom found tights and sewed a cape to go with your sister's dance leotard. That's even if you were a guy.
One year I was a ghost, for which we bought a cheap mask that my mother sewed into an old white sheet. And speaking of masks, many a year I walked through the windy, cold, Cleveland Halloween nights buried in a rubber face mask chapping my lips, chin and cheeks.
Typically, all the spare parts of costumes were kept in a trunk in the attic. We raided it year after year. My mom was the genius behind the homemade outfits. I recall the clown costume I wore at the end of my junior high school years. Mom dragged out red, long underwear. After I got into them, she shoved two balloons through the trap door and another into the belly. A cowboy carried a cap gun and wore a bandana.
Even when my kids were young, a Frankenstein costume was your uncle's old suit and a milk jug for a head.
Getting the goods
Now, here's the ironic part -- the candy bars were bigger. Oh yeah. There we were, in Aunt Lou's scarf with a gold earring, carrying a 25-cent rubber sword and pretending to be Bluebeard, and we got Baby Ruth bars as big as our hands.
Tootsie Rolls were so rare, we actually liked getting them. Common were full-size Hershey bars and Butterfinger bars, Mars bars, 3 Musketeers and 5th Avenues.
And baby, Halloween was a candy bonanza! I don't care if it was raining, snowing, or raining AND snowing, my sister and I were out there. The years one of us was sick, the other went out twice.
We took brown paper grocery bags and filled them, stopping home on occasion to empty the bags and go off again. Again, no typos here ... we FILLED them. We canvassed our entire neighborhood and then moved on and out.
Nobody checked for razor blades. We ate candy from the bag as we went (stupid, or safer, I don't know, but we did it).
At night, we piled up all the candy, sorted it and logged what we got -- 15 Hershey bars, nine Baby Ruths, 12 Tootsie Pops, and so on. Occasionally, someone dumped in a box of raisins. What loot those scrounged costumes netted us.
And then our parents let us keep the candy in our closets -- for as long as it took to eat it. And I may be wrong, but I don't think we ever had to ask permission to eat any of it, either. Wow, what a great holiday!
So, I hear $2.5 billion and I think, "Wow, how did fun get to be that expensive? And does it really have to be?"
murphy@vindy.com