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THE ORANGE Halloween lights went up early this year. And in our neighborhood, there seemed to be a lot more of them--along with tiny ghost dolls hanging from trees, cobweb-like fabric stretched across porches, plastic spiders perched on roofs, and bloody plastic hands emerging from cardboard gravestones. For some reason, Halloween seems to have become a bigger deal than it used to be.It''s not just an impression. In 1999 Halloween became the second-biggest American holiday, based on the amount of money spent on decorations. According to Unity Marketing, Americans spent $659 million on Halloween stuff in 1999, pushing it ahead of Easter into the No. 2 spot. (Christmas is easily No. 1, with $1.9 billion spent on decorating.)

According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), Halloween is now a $5 billion industry, and the American Express Retail Index reported that consumers spent an average of $98 last year on the holiday, an increase of 21% from 1998. In fact, Halloween''s popularity with consumers has grown consistently for the past two years.Halloween, however, falls on a Tuesday this year, so the weekday event may lack the drawing power of the past three years when it fell on the more festive weekend. Sales for 2000 aren''t expected to increase and will likely remain flat due to the timing, but retailers seem not to be deterred as they focus on capturing market share to boost the Halloween business.

If festivals reveal something about the concerns of our culture, we have to wonder about the meaning of this new emphasis on Halloween. What does it tell us about Americans at the turn of the 21st century?Well, perhaps not all that much. In a consumer culture that is now enjoying a sustained period of prosperity, the expanded celebration of Halloween may simply reveal that Americans have found another way to spend money. Those cute witch-hat lights and glass Halloween ornaments sell because somebody has the money to make them and somebody else has the money to buy them. Leigh Schmidt of Princeton University, who has studied the development of holidays and their intimate connection to commercial forces, says that the market always works to expand and extend holidays, encouraging more elaborate ways to celebrate.

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