Last year, Americans spent over $10 billion on Halloween

Monday, October 31st, 2022

Halloween may have a long and complex history, but today it’s more a creature of the marketplace than anything else. Last year, Americans spent over $10 billion on Halloween — over $3 billion on candy alone. Dentists must love Halloween.

Here’s an interesting feature of Halloween: we may get dressed up scary — but we don’t actually want to scare anybody. So why do we do it? Read more

Additional reading

News category: Odd Spot.

Tags: Consumerism, halloween

Let there be streams of Mass

Every Sunday, whoever is welcoming the gathered at my parish also welcomes those “joining us online,” before inviting us to stand for the processional hymn. Sometimes, I imagine that these folks are actually in the choir loft, where the camera Read more

Catholic church delivers some overdue fresh air to a gloomy city

It’s been a bruising April for many of Christchurch’s iconic landmarks, venues and events, teetering under the weight of their own financial turmoil. The Arts Centre’s management team continues to sound the threatening drumbeat of insolvency if the ratepayer doesn’t Read more

Richard Dawkins’ “cultural Christianity,” political theologies, and the Church of Pope Francis

Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and ethologist and one of the most famous atheists in the world, announced just a few weeks ago that he is a cultural Christian: “I do think we are culturally a Christian country. I call Read more

In ‘Infinite Dignity,’ the Vatican defends people, not politics

Many people, and not only Catholics, are talking about the new Vatican document, “Dignitas Infinita,” or Infinite Dignity. It tackles complicated moral ideas, many of them further complicated by current political debates. But many commentaries misunderstand what the Vatican presented, Read more

CathNews New Zealand