The Horror, the Horror: Halloween has grown into a big deal -- too big.

One morning about this time last year I stopped at a coffee shop. The line moved peacefully along, until it was my turn to order. "What'll it be?" said the fellow behind the counter, still looking down at his cash register. "A chocolate croissant and a cup of -- Aah!" I yelled. The man had raised his head and was looking at me with yellow goat-eyes. ". . . a cup of coffee, with milk," I finished, shakily. He was, of course, wearing special-effect contact lenses. But I had forgotten that it was almost Halloween, and, as far as my atavistic self was concerned, I had just gazed into the eyes of a monster. For a split second, it was terrifying.

Forget soaring rates of obesity, bankruptcy, and out-of-wedlock births: By far the scariest statistic about contemporary American life is that people now spend more on Halloween than on any other "holiday," apart from Christmas. We spend with abandon even when in the slough of national despond: In October 2001, with Ground Zero still smoldering and the country questioning whether it would ever laugh again, Americans still bought over $6.9 billion on tubes of fake blood, plastic pumpkins, and ghoul costumes. Heaven knows what the wallet- letting will be this year.

"Mummy, look! A circle of ghosts!"

The children are straining against their seatbelts in excitement as we drive past the most egregious manifestation of Halloween's new prominence: home decorating. Until the last five years or so -- and I can't imagine what happened to change things -- most Americans confined their Halloween celebrations to an orgy of candy-giving and -eating. But for whatever reason, the zeal to adorn homes with satanic images seized the national imagination. Lo, people began spiking witch hats and upside-down witch feet into their lawns to make it look as though a cauldron-stirrer had erred in her flight path and crashed straight into the ground.

"Over there! A giant spider web! Wow!"

We drive past a pretty white center-hall colonial festooned with plastic bats. A gruesome hanged man made of stuffed clothing swings from the limb of an oak tree. I speed up and hope the ardent young hearts behind me won't notice.

"Wait, Mummy, they've got a graveyard in their yard!"

I dread this time of year. It's not that I oppose the wearing of charming costumes by young children. My son Paris's outfit when he was five still ranks among the world's dearest. He wore a dark-green turtleneck (which he already had), dark-green trousers (ditto), and on to these we stapled cardboard lightning bolts covered with aluminum foil. He was the only electric eel in a class full of store-bought Pokemons. Nor do I question the rightness of shoving barrels of salt- water taffy down young throats. Goodness knows, I like a sugary tidbit on occasion, and my children can imagine nothing nicer than a sack of individually wrapped Snickers bars to eat all on their own.

What gets my sacrificial goat is that Halloween isn't about anything. It's not about death, or life, or fall, or The Fall, or family, or patriotic love of country. It is a completely content-free, dark-caped, sugar-frosted bacchanal in a society that already, every day, gives people license to be content-free, sugar-frosted, and to dress however gothically they like -- and that includes children.

The fact that I lost this battle when the children entered nursery school may explain my acidity. But when I was a girl, Halloween didn't involve obligatory full-school parades, pre-trick-or-treat parties for parents in fancy dress, or coffee jockeys with caprine contact lenses.

Halloween was a low-grade thrill experienced chiefly by the very young. We made costumes with the contents of our dress-up trunks, assembled our school-distributed UNICEF boxes, and marched out into the dusk to petition the neighbors for coins and sweets. Rumors abounded of men who slipped razors into apples, so we avoided mansard-roofed houses. We'd come home, sort the candy by category -- hard, chewy, and crunchy -- try to trade away those wax-paper-wrapped maple-nut toffees, and go to bed.

Now Halloween is epic-length, parents pay a fortune on mass-produced costumes, and the celebrants who spend most, oddly, fall in marketers' coveted 25-34 age range (the age more of partying than parenting). Through cunning marketing on the part of stuff-producers, and a dismaying weakness in the American character for stuff-buying, Halloween now "represents the beginning of a new season, not just one holiday," according to Tracy Mullin, president of the National Retail Federation. Spider rings! Frankenstein windsocks! Decorative skull lawnbags with twist ties! Every year there's more, and every year it arrives on the shelves a little earlier.

A scene from not so long ago: I am pushing a shopping cart filled with my children through a Connecticut supermarket. It is lovely outside, hot and sunny. We are wearing bathing suits under our clothes.

"Look, Mummy, candy!" Paris, six, crows, pointing to a monstrous heap of chocolates wrapped in black and orange foil.

"Halloween candy?!" I exclaim, not quite taking in what I am seeing.

"Candy!" cries Violet, who's three.

"Andy!" echoes Phoebe, who's two.

"Can you believe it, Mummy?" Molly says scornfully, gesturing at a stack of orange spheres further down the aisle. "Jack-o'-lanterns in August!"

When a nine-year-old can see through the phoniness of pushing late- October goods in the heat of summer, it must be phony indeed. We rattle disdainfully past the mounds of cheap Halloween candy, all of which, I am sure, has been gathering dust on warehouse pallets for the last ten months.

I blame the Irish. The heathen Celts celebrated Samhain, Lord of Darkness, in late autumn. That festival was co-opted by Christianity and became All Hallow's Eve, the night before All Saint's Day, which it remains. Irish immigrants introduced trick-or-treating to America -- it derives from an old peasant practice -- and Ireland brought us the tale of Jack-o'-the-Lantern, a shiftless Paddy condemned eternally to walk the earth with only a hollowed-out turnip to light his way (it became a pumpkin after large numbers of Jack's people landed at Ellis Island). October 31 was for hundreds of years a time to remember the loved and sainted dead, but has long since degenerated into the confused revelry we know today.

At school, I whip 'round the mothers to ask why they celebrate Halloween. "It's a Hallmark-created holiday," laughs Allison, who likes the tradition but limits her boys' costumes to the non-funereal. "But c'mon, it's fun for the kids."

"I don't like the dark, witchy undercurrents of Halloween," says Melissa, "but when else do you see high-and-mighty people in clown wigs?"

"I don't know what it means. We don't do it in Brazil," says Kareen, who doesn't do it here, either.

Apart from Wiccans, who have their own lavender-tinged, Celt-promoting agenda, it's hard to find anyone who knows why Americans now celebrate Halloween with such vigor. Yet you see middle-class women rummaging furiously through piles of made-in-China lion suits at $12.99 apiece to find the right size for their 18-month-olds. Step into a fabric store, and you will see mothers taking down bolts of cloth suitable for their little Grim Reapers, Gypsies, and Draculas. When they zip those costumes over their children and march out into the night, what do they think they're doing?

Don't get me wrong. Americans should be free to buy what they want, even inflatable skeletons and glow-in-the-dark vampire teeth. I also think that adults should have more fancy-dress parties, not fewer, especially elegant ones.

But there are two utterly creepy things about Halloween, quite apart from its glamorization of demons and axe-murderers. The first is that it's a trumped-up festival of nothingness -- as if our attention spans were so short that we needed a strange, cheap thrill between Labor Day and Thanksgiving. The second is that for nearly a month every year, Halloween infantilizes the entire country. Giggly pleasure in dress-ups and sweets is fetching in children. But when it overwhelms a great portion of the autumn, and otherwise grown-up people enter into the supposed "spirit" without having any idea why they do so, then it becomes a piece of sustained and irritating whimsy.

That's Halloween for you in a pumpkin-shell: sweet enough for children, but when adults join in, it's just plain childish.