Why has Halloween become so popular among adults?

By Linus Owens, Middlebury College For The Conversation Pago Pago, AMERICAN SAMOA — Halloween used to be kid stuff. To quit dressing up was an important rite of passage. It meant you were one step closer to becoming an adult. Not anymore. Today adults have become avid Halloween revelers, especially young adults. By 2005, just over half of adults celebrated Halloween. Today, that number has grown to over 70 percent. Those between 18 and 34 years old participate at the highest rate, and they’re also the holiday’s biggest spenders, shelling out over twice as much on their costumes as older adults and children. Halloween celebrations have changed, too: less trick-or-treating and more parties and bar hopping. Today, alcohol is as important as candy to the Halloween economy. Why has this been happening? Some blame it on millennials’ refusal to grow up and enter the “real world.

” But that’s too simplistic of an explanation. I’ve been studying how young adults are celebrating Halloween, and what sort of relationship this might have to the changing norms and expectations of adulthood. Young adults’ embrace of Halloween could have something to do with the fact that adulthood itself has changed. If Halloween has become more popular among adults, it’s because traditional markers of adulthood have become less clear and less attainable. HALLOWEEN;S SHIFTING MEANING Sociologists tell us if you want to understand a culture, look at its holidays. Christmas gift-giving rituals shed light on how we manage social relationships. Thanksgiving feasts depend on shared understandings of family and national origin stories. Halloween, with its emphasis on identity, horror and transgression, can tell us about who we want to be and what we fear becoming. Historian Nicholas Rogers has argued that…