Today, Halloween evokes images of costumes and candy, haunted houses and hayrides, friends and fun. With $2.6 billion expected to be spent on costumes and $2.08 billion on candy for the holiday, it is clear Americans have lost sight of the true meaning of All Hallow’s Eve — worshiping the dead.

A recent Pew poll reveals 93 percent of children ages 5 to 10 believe Halloween is about having fun and eating candy with their friends. That statistic is heartbreaking. It seems that an increasing number of kids have not been taught that Halloween is really about venerating the dead, glorifying their evil spirits and then performing a witch ceremony to incur black magic and other demonic powers.

The report cited that 80 percent of toddlers consider Halloween their favorite holiday. But when asked what the witching hour was, only 1 percent of respondents knew it is the time in which spawns of the dead feed off human flesh and offer a blood sacrifice to demons. This kind of secularization of Halloween as just a so-called fun holiday for dressing up is the direct result of two distinct societal failures. The first of these failures falls on modern day parents, who have not educated their children about the traditions of Hallow’s eve.

A Gallup survey last week revealed 92 percent of children did not know that the purpose of wearing costumes is to appease the undead. Responses such as “because it’s fun” show a perpetuating ignorance in the United States about the celebration of Halloween. It used to be about getting together with your tribe or clan, huddling around a bonfire and performing witchcraft in the hopes of exalting lost souls from their graves. It used to be about what really mattered.

This tight-knit idolization of the dead has been virtually erased in modern American culture. And that is because of a second failure I mentioned, which is the mass media’s commodification of Halloween. For too long television and online programming have reduced ghosts and goblins to mere decor pieces for a Halloween party, rather than apparitions who roam the Earth at midnight after a hard-won hundred of years of evil-praising incantations.

This Halloween, take a moment and ask a friend what the holiday means to them. I can almost guarantee they won’t mention anything about certain ethnic groups coming together to celebrate the dead, evoking phantom spirits and using mystical powers to raise the souls of evil forces. Halloween must return to a time of dead-worship. How much longer will we let it remain a secular holiday where kids go out with their friends and families to have fun?

This story is part of our fictitious coverage in celebration of Halloween 2013. All people and events in the story are fictional.

A version of this article appeared in the Thursday, Oct. 31 print edition. Rocky is Dr. Frank N. Furter’s creation. Email her at [email protected].