According to CNNMoney–which is actually quoting Spirit Halloween, the country’s largest seasonal Halloween retailer–Charlie Sheen is the most popular choice for a costume this season. Spirit President and CEO Steven Silverstein cited Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and Snooki (or any member of the gang from the “Jersey Shore” cast) as top choices for women. For kids? The mobile phone app Angry Birds.

But the National Retail Federation begs to disagree. They say zombies are hot for Halloween and “traditional costumes” still rank as consumer favorites. Witches (13.4%) will be the top choice for adults while pirates (3.9%) and vampires (3.7%) Batman (2.2%), cats (2.2%) and vixens (2.1%) will also be popular with adults this year. For the kids, princesses (11%) continue their seven-year reign as the top children’s costume while other top choices for kids include Spiderman (3.1%), Batman (2.4%) and Superman (1.3%). Additionally, fairies (2.6%), Disney princesses (2.2%) and vampires (2.4%) made the top 10 for children. The most popular pet costume will be a pumpkin (10.7%), with devils (8.1%) and hot dogs (6.0%) following closely behind. Some pet owners also plan to dress their pet up like a cat (3.7%) or a dog (2.0%). (Personally, my cats will be cleverly disguised as cats.)

Also, according to NRF’s 2011 Halloween Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey conducted by BIGresearch, seven in 10 Americans (68.6%) plan to celebrate Halloween, up from 63.8 percent last year and the most in theor survey’s nine-year survey history. The average person will spend $72.31 on decorations, costumes and candy, up from $66.28 last year. Total Halloween spending is expected to reach $6.86 billion. More people plan to dress in costume (43.9% vs. 40.1% in 2010), throw or attend a party (34.3% vs. 33.3% last year) and visit a haunted house (22.9% vs. 20.8%) than in 2010. Additionally, 49.5% will decorate their home/yard and 14.7 percent will dress their pets in costume. Other traditional celebratory activities include handing out candy (73.5%), carving a pumpkin (47.8%) and taking children trick-or-treating (32.9%).

But if you want to invest your Halloween dollars wisely, we recommend a nice fat anthology! Preferably one of ours:Halloween,Creatures, Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Beware the Night, Vampires: The Recent Undead, Zombies: The Recent Dead, and Running With the Pack would be much more entertaining than dressing up as Charlie Sheen.

One of the most common Halloween party activities is bobbing for apples. Other than apples being abundant in many areas for Halloween, there are the physics of the thing: Apples contain a relatively large amount of air and, since the skin is waxy, the air does not escape rapidly so they readily float. And, unless you cheat and go for the stem, their size and round shape make them fairly difficult to bite when bobbing about in the water.

Depending on the era, there might be more to it than just winning a game. At the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th, Halloween parties were full of fortune telling (often connected to predicting one’s true love or who one was to marry or when) the first to get an apple would supposedly be the first to marry.

But that connection had disappeared by the time I was bobbing for apples.

So, as cute as this vintage card is…

I hated bobbing for apples when I was a kid. If you were wearing Halloween makeup, it would usually be destroyed. At the very least your costume and/or hair got soaked. And, okay, I WORE GLASSES. So I could either take them off and be blind or keep them on and risk my specs falling into the water or having them jostled off my face to the floor. Not that the water would harm my spectacles, but falling or getting them knocked off part might…ohmigawd…break them.

Hey, my eyes were bad. Every six month for years (starting at age six) I got progressively thicker lenses. And there weren’t any “lightweight” or “shatterproof” alternatives. They were expensive and ugly. I spent a great deal of my childhood being afraid of breaking my glasses. Hated wearing them, yes, but better than being blind…

Plus—fer real—putting your face into a tub of cold water with no more reward than a plain old apple? Ick. And I bet boys spit in the water or, or, licked the apples and got cooties on them. Ick-ick!

Well, fright is a part of Halloween. Eventually I realized sharing spit with boys wasn’t so bad. But I was past apple-bobbing by the time I got contact lenses.

I still have my doubts about apple bobbing. If you have any doubts about the insidiousness of this so-called game, read Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party, in which a girl is drowned in an apple-bobbing tub.

Combining two days into one because…well, ywo days tend to combine into one for me sometimes…

Pumpkin-headed characters appear in many stories…so, of course, some pop up in the stories in Halloween. Here are some notes (taken from introductions to “Pumpkin Night” by Gary McMahon and Gary Braunbeck’s “Tessalations” explaining a bit about the archetype.

Literature’s most famous pumpkinhead may not be exactly as you’ve seen depicted or recall. In Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), Ichabod Cranes sees “a horseman of large dimensions . . . mounted on a black horse of powerful frame,” and later sees “the goblin rising in his stirrups, and in the very act of hurling his head at him.” The next morning “the tracks of horses’ hoofs deeply dented in the road, and evidently at furious speed, were traced to the bridge, beyond which, on the bank of a broad part of the brook, where the water ran deep and black, was found the hat of the unfortunate Ichabod, and close beside it a shattered pumpkin.” Despite the usual illustrations and depictions, Irving did not mention if the pumpkin had a faced carved into it.

The L. Frank Baum character mentioned in Braunbeck’s “Tessalations”, Jack Pumpkinhead, first appeared in The Marvelous Land of Oz, the immediate sequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in 1904. A boy, Tip, makes the pumpkin-headed scarecrow in hopes of frightening the witch Mombi. Mombi, however, brings Jack to life. Although he appears in many of the Oz books—frequently replacing his ever-rotting head with a fresh pumpkin—he is featured in the twenty-third (the ninth penned by Ruth Plumly Thompson): Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz (1929). There’s no direct connection between Baum’s Jack Pumpkinhead and Halloween, but similar figures have become firmly associated with the holiday. He may have inspired Tim Burton’s Jack Skellington, the “Pumpkin King” protagonist of the film The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993).

Our treat for today is a poem I considered for Halloween, but realized that although certainly spooky, it really didn’t involve Halloween.

There are many ideas about its meaning Goblin Market by Christina Rosetti (the link is to a Wikipedia article mentioning some of them) but it’s also the only poem I can think of that mentions wombats.

Enjoy the poem here! Ponder its meanings…and avoid goblins!

Very happy to see on Holly Black’s blog that she is writing a novel loosely based on “The Coldest Girl in Coldtown”. It is a super story, one of my favorites in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2010. Yay, Holly!