Halloween is very clearly out of control.

You could put it in dollars and cents: Americans will spend something like $13 billion on the holiday this year, almost four times more than we did 20 years ago. Even with the massive inflation of the past decade, that is bonkers. Halloween now ranks up with Mother’s Day and Father’s Day for annual spending, and nobody has to buy any Halloween presents or go to an overpriced brunch. Bobbing for apples is a lot cheaper than the omelet station.

But a better measurement may be time and effort. What was at the turn of this century still mostly a one-day celebration now sprawls over two weeks.

We’ve long had the Halloween retail blitz starting immediately after the back-to-school displays come down around Labor Day. That’s just the warmup before America’s best and most badly neglected holiday, Thanksgiving, gives way to the trillion-dollar Christmas spend-a-thon. Now, however, it’s way beyond the retail world. Many communities now host “witches ride” events, “trunk-or-treat” candy and costume jamborees and huge, expensive Halloween parades.

Multiple costumes over multiple days, full-sized candy bars in trick-or-treaters’ bags and

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