Halloween 2007 at The Sleaze

October again, and, despite last year vowing never to do it again, I'm busy putting together a series of loosely themed stories for Halloween. The first of them, Psychic Sex Pest?, is already up on The Sleaze. This one started life as a rewrite and expansion of an Off The Wrist post here on Sleaze Diary, but quickly went off on a tangent, so much so that only a couple of lines from the original remain. During the course of the month it should (if everything goes according to plan) be joined by Hijab Halloween (again based on a post and comic strip from here), and I Married a Poltergeist, a sequel of sorts to last Halloween's Scared Stiff. However, things could change if I suddenly experience a burst of creative inspiration and come up with something better.

On the subject of Halloween, I find the way in which it has become so commercialised in this country in the space of only a few years quite fascinating. Not so long ago the only Halloween-related merchandising you'd find in your local supermarket would be a special offer on pumpkins, a couple of tatty rubber masks and (if you were lucky) a set of plastic vampire fangs. Nowadays there are aisles chock full of costumes, masks, fake blood, the full works. It's clear that businesses would like to turn it into another lucrative 'shopping festival', like Christmas. There was a time when all this Halloween merchandising provided a welcome bulwark against the onset of its Christmas counterparts - shops had to wait until November before they could 'start' the festive season on their shelves. This year, however, they don't seem to care and, before September was even over, you could find Christmas cakes rubbing shoulders with plastic devil horns and pitchforks in the supermarkets. It's all very confusing and will only end in tears.