Welcome to my parlor, love. May I offer you a chalice of blood?
Be careful not to step on any scurrying rats. They bite, you know.
It’s the season for menacing black ravens and bloody-footprint decals. Retailers have stocked their shelves with the spookiest merchandise as we creep toward Halloween, the second-largest decorating holiday of the year.
Linda Brooks at The Party Store in Lexington predicted tombstones and crawly spiders will add a scary touch to many Halloween decors this year.
“Spiders were good for us last year, and it looks like they’re going to be good again,” said Chris Koziol, an employee at Lexington’s Halloween Express. He has a 6-foot spider with blinking red eyes, plus smaller, black-and-green evil-looking furry spiders. Colorful, but not so forbidding, is a purple-and-black tinsel spider curtain to hang in a doorway.
Halloween Express is a chain of 150 retail outlets that focuses on this single holiday.
Between coming up with new ideas for decorations and costumes, the manufacturing, plus the hectic month of sales, “We work Halloween 10 months out of the year,” Koziol said. The company was started in North Carolina in the early 1990s, he said, and moved its headquarters to Owenton, Ky., in 1996.
New at several retailers including Halloween Express are Flore Gore decals of rats escaping from a metal register – great to stick on a floor in a dark corner.
Continuing a trend started a few years ago, “There’s tons of animated stuff out now. Everything moves and talks and makes noises,” said Hunter Sherwood, chief display designer at The Party Store. Look for motion-activated candy bowls that talk or a skeleton hand that clatters across a table when a guest walks by. There’s also a creepy character who pops out of the top of a tombstone, demanding to know, “Who goes there?”
Outdoor lights used to be used only for Christmas.
“Now you drive around, and people’s yards are lit up with big inflatable pumpkins and Scooby Doos,” said Jonnie Soards, an employee at Halloween Express.
A survey by the National Retail Federation found that Halloween spending this year is estimated to reach $3.12 billion, up from $2.96 billion last year. In terms of overall spending, Halloween ranks sixth after the winter holidays, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day because it is not a gift-giving or apparel holiday.
However, at The Party Store, “It’s very big for us, bigger than Christmas,” said Brooks, who owns the store with her husband, Les. Youngsters like to get dressed up for parties and trick-or-treating, but for adults, “It’s fun to pretend and be a little kid again.”
Black-and-orange martini glasses and themed paper plates and napkins were being snatched up last recently at The Front Porch in Lexington. The Paperweight, a stationery and card store on Clay Avenue, had an early rush on Halloween invitations.
“Halloween is hot this year,” said Wanda Criggall, a sales associate at The Paperweight. When Halloween is on a weeknight, “adults don’t get really involved that much because you have to get up and go to work the next day,” she said. This year, because it comes on the weekend, “adults can dress up and really have fun.”
(c) 2004, Lexington Herald-Leader (Lexington, Ky.).

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