A scary fact: Halloween seems to come earlier every year

Mar 07, 2024

On the morning of July 23, Andrew Carle entered the Lowe’s home improvement store in Chantilly, Va., and was greeted by bloodcurdling screams and maniacal laughter. This was not what Andrew, who designs senior living communities, expected at the hardware store.

The source of the sounds turned out to be a large display of animatronic characters. There was a 12-foot-tall mummy, priced at $348; a witch clutching a skull in her bony fingers; a scythe-wielding scarecrow; and a skeletal two-piece band with “Don’t Fear the Reapers” emblazoned on the front bass drum head. All of these Halloween decorations moved and moaned and pulsed with light.

Andrew’s reaction: “It’s July!”

As he wrote in an email to me: “Does Lowe’s really think its customers should have to look at, let alone listen to, this nonsense while trying to shop for nearly four months, one third of the year? For a holiday for children that lasts about four hours?”

After he wrote about his encounter on Facebook, Andrew heard from his brother, who said he’d seen the same display at a Lowe’s in Binghamton, N.Y. A friend in Newport News, Va., reported the same thing.

For his part, Andrew put down his items, left the store and vowed not to return to Lowe’s until November, when Halloween is safely in the rearview mirror.

“Is this kind of ridiculousness really good for business?” he wondered. “They certainly lost me.”

When it comes to holidays that come too early — or are marketed too early — the one people usually complain about is Christmas. Or maybe Christmas is just the first one people started complaining about. Now all of the holidays seem to be creeping forward.

And it’s not just specific holidays. Seasons are increasingly fungible. We used to joke about pumpkin spice season existing at all. Now we say, “Is it pumpkin spice season already?”

I was at my local Giant food store the other day and there was a small section of autumnal items, what I would call Thanksgiving stuff: ceramic pumpkin mugs, wooden squirrels holding signs reading “Harvest Welcome,” orange centerpieces that said “Fall is my favorite color.”

It was close to 100 degrees outside, but in this little section of the supermarket, it was time to rake the leaves and mull the wine.

I suppose we shouldn’t blame retailers — Halloween brings in $10 billion a year. If people will buy it, why not sell it? I think that’s what “The Wire” was all about.

But July?

Bill Boltz, executive vice president of merchandising at Lowe’s, said Halloween enthusiasts think about Halloween year-round.

“Lowe’s is committed to delivering new and exciting innovative products to our customers; at the right time while they’re searching for it pre-season,” he wrote in an email. And this season’s selection of products — including the aforementioned pneumatic animatronic figures — is the chain’s largest.

If you’ve been thinking about Halloween since November, the time to get in gear is now.

I was curious when local stores used to begin advertising their Halloween wares, so I looked in old newspapers. In 1899, the first — the only — Halloween-related ad I could find in The Washington Post from Woodward & Lothrop, the late and lamented department store, ran on Oct. 28. It was for Halloween toys and noted: “We have received our new line of Party Games, including the Monkey Donation Party, Dressing the New Woman, the Dude Party, the Elephant Party, Helen’s Naughty Baby, Our Cinderella Party, the Tandem Party, and the Donkey Party, all of which are amusing for both young and old.”

You can keep your animatronic skeleton. I want to know what it was like to play the Monkey Donation Party or Helen’s Naughty Baby.

By 1905, the Woodies Halloween ad in The Post had crept a little earlier: Oct. 25. The Halloween items made up just one portion of a large ad for products ranging from men’s derby hats to new silk petticoats. Pumpkin jack-o’-lanterns started at a nickel. You could get three different sizes of “Satan mounted on a stand, with candy box attached,” from 25 cents to $1.

Not as frightening as a mummy that lights up and screams, perhaps, but a whole lot cheaper. And by purchasing it a week before Halloween, as opposed to three months, there was less of a chance you’d be sick of it by the time Oct. 31 rolled around.