The New Vampire Reality--Just in Time for Halloween

I was most amused by the first piece of web news that caught my eye this morning. The headline?

“Retailers worried rocky economy could ruin Halloween.”

If retailers don’t like the spending they’re seeing for Halloween, then brother, they are really going to hate the way Christmas shoppers behave this year.

I have little doubt that the fourth quarter of 2008 will bring genuine financial pain to a broad range of businesses -- global and domestic -- at a level unmatched in four-fifths of our population’s living memory. You’d think that anyone paying even distant attention to the economic gloom of late might have surmised that the reality of uber-consumption, at least for a while, has changed.

Times are already bad for many folks, especially the millions who were financially stressed coming into this. These poor bastards are now and have always been minimized and marginalized, so we mainstream-types just see right through them; they are invisible to us. Within only a matter of months, however, we will substituting the words ‘many folks’ with the words ‘most folks.’ That means you and I could well become invisible to the fewer and fewer ‘Haves’ as jobs and payrolls shrink, consumers cut their spending to the bone, tight credit contracts durable goods production and sales channels, and fewer bags of processed orange-sugar ghosts and diethyl-moopgloop-hedromine goblins get tossed into America’s shopping carts pre-Halloween.

Living rooms and kitchen tables across America are on fire with talk of a long winter looming large on the near-term economic horizon. Already I see a lot fewer plastic pumpkins and giant scary store-bought monsters with glowing eyes sucking on my neighbors’ electric bills. It’s a rural area, and what’s popping up on porches in my world are arrangements of corn husks and colorful gourds (no doubt locally grown), and little skeletons the kids made out of whatever paper and crayons were kicking around the house. That’s how many Americans are getting ready for Halloween this year. The ones who spend $200 on candy, trash and trinkets may soon wish they had put that money in the butter and egg jar, instead.

I love the idea of taking a break from commercialism to celebrate holidays more simply; I just wish the idea had come from within ourselves rather than forced upon us courtesy of painful new economic realities. Who knows, maybe that’s the only way change happens these days.