Has Halloween become less popular?

I really hate halloween! I never liked it, I always thought it was stupid. I’m 14.
I guess the older people get they don’t give a damn about it anymore, but some people still dress up and whatnot.

It does seem like it’s fading in popularity, and has been seeming to do so for the past few years.

How much someone likes Halloween, however, has nothing to do with aging – unless you let it. I’ve always loved Halloween, always will. It’s the best holiday ever and I’m almost 25. ;)

It pisses me off that a lot of neighborhoods don’t have Halloween ON Halloween anymore. It’s the Saturday before, if Halloween doesn’t fall on a Saturday, and now there are so many safety precautions and the costumes are so boring and uncreative, it’s really a shame. I love Halloween. But it used to be so much better.

I’m 16 and yes I do agree it’s fading in popularity.
[edit] in my school, some people dress like in halloween costumes every damn day.

I remember when I was a kid, I used to love Halloween, but now the only thing I look forward towards halloween are the old school slasher movies they show on TV.
I think it’s because of people’s lack of creativity nowadays

I love Halloween, have always loved Halloween and now I do it up with my kids and we have a great time. I think that with any holiday, Halloween is exactly what you make it.

Maybe I’m blinded by the horror. I love halloween and I’m just always stoked that it’s here that I don’t see the fading, if it is. Speaking of which I gotta start thinking of a costume.

Too many pedophiles, or presumed pedophiles.

Halloween should be outlawed. All it does is pump money into the corporations by bullying the parents into buying their ridiculous cheap costumes and encourage children to blackmail their victims into giving them their valued property (sweets).
It is a training event for future criminals and terrorists.

I think it’s more popular. At least where I live. We have more and more stores with Halloween items, our children’s school has a Halloween parade every year and we always have tons of kids knocking at our door. The entire month of October is full of scary movies on cable and Ghost Hunters has a live show on Halloween. It’s my favorite time of year.

I think halloween is one holiday that is pretty much just for kids and as parents get more worried about thier children going door to door the holiday will become less popular.

It may be fading from the mainstream (because parents want everything sanitized nowadays for their special snowflakes), but Samhain is still popular among certain groups. ;) Take back the Night!

I think it is quite the contrary people seem to go all out for Halloween like never before. People seem to decorate more for any holiday lately to me. I think for you it that you are going through a transitition phase you are to young for adult Halloween parties and too old for trick a treating. As for the movies one scary movie after another comes out lately so it is hard to have a fest of them on any particular day. Hope you decorate this year maybe do a teen scare tactic it might bring back more of the spirit for you for one of my favorite holidays as well.

I was never allowed to celebrate halloween, and my parents didn’t/don’t give out candy to the neighborhood kids. We had “harvest festivals” at my grade school and dressed up as Biblical characters, superheroes, etc. Anything but witches, ghosts, zombies and the like…I personally don’t need a holiday to indulge in candy lol

Well, it is kind of a holiday for younger kids, so I wouldn’t expect older kids or adults to be very interested in it.

@DominicX
we could dress up as foxes and then meet in the bushes :D

I sure hope it’s not fading! I go to, or hold a Halloween party every year. I love Halloween. I decorate, dress up, make Halloween CD mixes, and give out candy every year. I love the crafts, the atmosphere, the candy, the music, the weather, night time, scary movies… ok, now I’m excited! And now that I have a kid, it’s fun to dress him up and let him have some candy.

@DominicX : Baloney! It’s for adults, too, but it’s just more about dressing like sluts and getting plastered for them. ;)

@ragingloli : Hahaha!

We still do a lot for Halloween and see a lot of other trick-or-treaters when we take our kids out. And most of their costumes are homemade!

I love Halloween. We go to the orchard to pick pumpkins, and while we’re there we get some apple cider and visit the “Build a Scarecrow” stand. The kids get lost in a hay maze until we go in to rescue them. It’s a fun tradition, and all of the activities are either free or inexpensive.

Carving pumpkins is my husband’s domain, as the artist in the family. The kids draw designs on paper, and he adapts them for pumpkin carving. The pumpkin-lighting ceremony is a very big deal! The schools have costume parades and parties, and we always go trick-or-treating on Halloween. A lot of the houses have elaborate decorations. It’s exhausting for us grownups, but to the kids everything about Halloween is fun and special. Getting to relive it through them is pretty fun and special for me too.

As a side note, when I was in college my sorority had a great way for us to get into the Halloween spirit without feeling like we were stealing candy from kids. We’d dress up, divide into small groups, and trick-or-treat for canned goods in various neighborhoods around the city. All of the canned goods went to the local food bank. People were always so excited about what we were doing, they gave us candy along with the canned goods. It was a fun excuse to act like a kid when we weren’t kids and didn’t yet have any kids. So those of you who may want to go trick or treating but are too old to get away with it, just collect canned goods instead. ;)

No one is too old to get away with trick-or-treating. As a matter of fact, I chose to write an essay on this very topic for my writing class. My mom chose to go trick-or-treating one year, at the age of… Wait for it… 40! Do you think people got mad and slammed the door in her face? Farrr from it – everyone but one person absolutely loved it.

I’m of the opinion that if people think there’s an age that’s too old to trick-or-treat, there should also be an age that’s too old to receive presents on Christmas. Which, I think, is completely stupid. It’s all about magic, fun and never losing your sense of wonder.

Halloween was a down time for me from ages 14 to 18. Once I got to college, it was fun again, but in a different way.

Yes, I attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison before 2000.

I have always loved Halloween. I am going on my twelfth year of a display in my yard. I redesign it new every year, and it takes about two weeks to build. I spend the whole year planning it. Halloween is only second to Giftmas in advertising dollars, and the number of professional haunted Halloween attractions is increasing across the country. Some attractions are now open year round.

The public spends millions of dollars on Halloween goodies, attractions, and apparel yearly. Google Halloween attractions, popularity, and just about any other subject with Halloween in the title, and get back hundreds of links on the subject. I have seen hundreds of DIY Halloween projects as well.

Unfortunately, the whole trick or treating thing has suffered ever since the urban legends about razor blades, needles, and other foreign objects being placed in candy and apples. Here is a good place to catch up on all the legends, and the few recorded cases of nutjobs trying to ruin a great holiday.

The fucking media has to keep people scared, and what better way than to broadcast that crazy people will put sharp objects in candy or fruit, or that pedophiles and child murderers lurk on every street corner in America. The media should stick to what they are good at, following celebrities and politicians, reporting the scores of sporting events, misdiagnosing the weather and just leave my beloved holiday alone.

And don’t even get me started on the churches and their Hallelujah Celebrations because they mistakenly assume the pagan origins of Halloween have something to do with the Christian anti-hero Satan. If they want to have church celebrations on Halloween, fine, I don’t care, but don’t spew this nonsense about how it’s fucking Satan’s birthday.

This is a clear cut case of how urban legends and those media talking heads spread misinformation.

And anyone who doesn’t like Halloween is obviously a cold heartless bastid. You are never too old to have fun.

And the threat of pedophiles going after little Johnny or Judy dressed in their cute little costumes is just crazy! We always went in groups, and with an adult, or older sibling to watch out for us, like crossing roads and such. Anyone who doesn’t monitor their children’s activities shouldn’t be a parent, and should raise guppies instead.

Pretty soon everyone will be too frightened to venture outside and we will live like lab mice in cages.

What a sorry fucking place the world will be then.

@evelyns_pet_zebra I lurve you! :D

I would love to do this display for Halloween,

@evelyns_pet_zebra I second jonsblond! <3

@jonsblond Pumpkin mayhem is always a good idea. I may have to get some pumpkins this year and go all Calvin and Hobbes.

Apparently the idea of going door to door for candy is losing favor, but many clubs and local shopping malls now have a “safe” Halloween celebration where kids can dress up (or not) and go around to the stores and get free candy. Our mall usually has several thousand children show up, with competitions for the youngest ones early in the evening, and a final competition for the older kids and adults just before closing.

Several of the young people in my family work the charity Halloween Haunt every year, and it is open for every weekend in October. This year should be a big winner with Halloween coming on the weekend. They usually get several thousand people come through the Haunted House. This year they have a huge warehouse and they are going to feature several different “haunts” to serve different groups, children, scary or not scary.

Halloween keeps growing more in popularity every year.

More and more of these temporary fully stocked Halloween stores open up in newer places for the entire month.

Teenagers and adults as well as kids flock to these haunted attractions every year. The major theme parks keep their season open until after October now when in years past they used to shut down.

I don’t see any decline at all and I love it. You asked if TD just you who thinks it’s declining and the answer is pretty much yes. Maybe it’s just a transition you’re going thru. The rest of us are ready to partay !

Funny it doesn’t seem to get less popular from over here (In fact it’s catching on in Europe, stores are starting to see commercial profit in it). Seems to me like you are just growing up and no longer in the middle of all that madness anymore, that doesn’t mean parents with younger kids stopped enjoying it.

It’s like December 24th/25th, just because you stopped believing in the postal address of some geezer on the North Pole doesn’t mean everybody else stopped sending him letters (Sorry had to keep it vague for @Tink1113‘s beliefs, never would have guessed you were 14, kudos for that).

I’m with @DrasticDreamer I still love it and I’m almost 25 too! The main problem I see with Halloween is what I like to call “The Pussification of Our Children” It all started when the news began scaring the shit out of parents about everything. Let’s take childrens playground equipment for example. It used to be made out of metal and wood had tall slides and see-saws and those merry-go-round thingys and all was good. Then one little kid fell and broke their neck on it and the news spread the tale like wild fire and now playgrounds are all fucking plastic and pillows and children never even get a scrape. Pussification. Of course this is all my take and it didn’t go down like that but something along those lines happened. Now to take it back to Halloween when I was younger, and I am not very old mind you, trick or treating and such started at dusk and went on for like 2 hours. Now parents are so scared of fucking pedophiles and razor candy that trick-or-treat starts at 5 and lasts an hour. What’s the fun in that? None! It’s weak. There are just as many pedophiles and sick fucks doing shit to candy as there were “back in the day”, perhaps they have gotten bolder, but I see no need for us to ruin fun things and coddle the youth of today over news reports. The day my Dad took away our slip and slide, after he saw a 60 minutes where some dumb kid set his slide up on some rocky ground and broke his neck, was a sad day for me. Fuck you Morely Safer you ruined my childhood! haha

I love Halloween! I like all the candy and treats and scaring! Im really excited for this fall! It’ll be a blast! And that my birthday is coming up gets me even happier! :D Ill never get tired of Halloween…well at least not now.:O

@madcapper What’s really annoying is the fact that the vast, vast, majority of those “candy scares” were/are hoaxes. Look it up on www.snopes.com or google it, and you’ll find out it’s mainly an urban legend. In the past 60 years, there have only been a handful of candy-tampering cases that were not proven to be hoaxes. No one has been killed by Halloween candy, or even seriously injured. When I told my mom this, she swore up and down that each year at Halloween when she was a kid, there were multiple stories in the news about children who were poisoned, killed, or maimed by candy. I actually looked through news archives to see what she was talking about, and I found…..absolutely nothing.

Just for the record, we take our kids out at dusk on Halloween and trick-or-treat until their legs get tired or walking or their arms wear out from carrying that load of candy. Judging from the number of other children and families we see, most people around here do the same thing.

Scaring parents has become a very profitable business for the media and for companies that sell baby-proofing items. Helmets for babies learning to walk, toilet locks, etc. It’s so over the top. Why should Halloween be exempt from the hysteria?

@MissAusten You are correct. In one of the most widely reported cases of finding a razorblade in an apple, it was proven that the razorblade came from the home of the parent that reported it, and he was prosecuted for child endangerment of his own child.

@MissAusten the fact that you just told me there were “helmets for children learning to walk” just pisses me off even more haha

It has become less popular because major retailers have told us in August that the most important upcoming holiday is Christmas, never mind Halloween or Thanksgiving.

I used to have a boyfriend who would go to an all night grocery store a night or two before Halloween and buy two items – a bag of cheap apples, and a box of razor blades – just to see the look on the cashier’s face. :) Of course, he didn’t harm children or anything.

@laureth sounds like the sort of guy who would send a friend to the store with the following items on a list “Vaseline, bananas, condoms, tampons, baby wipes, and adult diapers”

There are several competing stores that rent available storefronts to sell nothing but Halloween decorations and costumes. They stay open for about 8 weeks, and our streets look about like Christmas, with Halloween lights and animated figures filling the yards for blocks around. It is fun to go driving around in the week before Halloween and look at all the colorful decorations.

@laureth wow he doesn’t sound creepy or anything…