Sales of which products are booming even as overall consumer spending is going bust? Sarah Palin masks and candy corn.

Consumer confidence may be at record lows, but sales of Halloween-related goods are expected to rise 14 percent this year, to $5.77 billion, according to a National Retail Federation survey conducted by BIGresearch.

That's especially impressive for a holiday that finds itself wedged between punishing back-to-school sales results earlier this fall and a chilling holiday shopping season in which some see sales growth as low as 1.5 percent.

Kathy Grannis, a spokeswoman for the National Retail Federation, explains that Halloween provides a cheap, fun diversion from the pressures of real life, as well as being one of the few holidays where people are encouraged to indulge themselves rather than others.

"The notion of doom and gloom can really only last so long in consumers' minds before they go out and invest in some fun," Grannis says.

Fun—and junk food, which has been one of the major winners in our nation's growing enthusiasm for the year's spookiest holiday.

Sales of candy for Halloween have skyrocketed in recent years to around $1.6 billion annually. Since 2003, the amount of money people said they expected to spend on Halloween candy has increased 42 percent to $20.39 per capita, according to the N.R.F.

If you think the increased candy spend is primarily kid-oriented, think again. While Halloween in the 1950s and 1960s was very focused around children, it's now returning to its historical roots as a raucous adult affair that functions as an opportunity to temporarily suspend order, violate borders, and escape from reality.

According to the N.R.F.'s Halloween Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey, more people over the age of 18 plan to celebrate Halloween this year than last, up to about 65 percent from 59 percent last year.

That means it's the increasingly stressed-out grown-ups who are chowing down on those fun-sized Snickers bars on and around October 31. And it's certainly not second-graders who have made Sarah Palin getups one of the hottest-selling costumes this Halloween.

Bob Thompson, a professor of popular culture at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, says that free-for-all celebrations like Halloween function as release and catharsis for a society under stress.

"Lately, Halloween has been being reclaimed as a holiday celebrated by adults," says Thompson. "This year, October 31 falls at really a perfect time to just let loose in one of these 'flip everything over' settings—the election, the economic crisis, the war in Iraq—holidays have become loci of negotiation for these kinds of things."