But Halloween's tomorrow...?

I'm baffled. There are only candy remnants and a few Halloween items in stores. But Halloween's tomorrow? It's not like it was last week or something and I missed it. Right?? After this morning driving to a lot of stores trying to find Halloween baking stuff, I feel a bit like it's the Twilight Zone.

Now Christmas stuff was out in all its glory but the H'ween stuff was gone. I do think partly ransacked but also just gone - from shelves, displays, prime corner spots. Wha...??

Tomorrow night is my church's Halloween party for youth and kids. I'm baking cupcakes and wanted to get cute holiday cupcake wrappers and sprinkles to make them special. I remember seeing all this baking stuff a few weeks ago at Target so I went over this morning after a business mtg (I also went to my neighborhood Safeway last night just to check but there was nothing at all. That was the beginning of my confusion.)

But Target had been invaded by the Thanksgiving and Christmas elves. So I went to Michael's, a craft store that also is a great spot to buy baking supplies and usually goes ape-crazy over holiday decorations/crap. But nada. I asked an employee who said it's all gone and that the sale was last week. I know that Michael's does sales early but I didn't think they basically threw out ther merchandise before the holiday even happened. He said anything left would be in the middle aisle. I wandered over and found other confused people like myself poking around in the pathetic two boxes of random Halloween stuff. A woman said, "This is weird" and I said, "I know, isn't it tomorrow?" and she said, "I'll head over to Target" and I said, "There's nothing there either, just candy."

I walked over to Kmart and found random, nonsale (??) items. I picked up a sprinkle variety mix and some mini-cupcake wrappers but there weren't any normal size ones. I went to Safeway to pick up white icing (no orange icing to be found) and still, no Halloween stuff besides candy.

I mean, I don't think of myself as a procrastinator but as a "just-on-time" kind of person. But did I miss the memo that said Oct. 1 is the new "on-time" prep date for Halloween and Oct. 30 is the new "too late, so sorry" date? I feel like I remember going to buy Easter stuff the day before Easter - on sale (yey) but there. Stores understood that parents sometimes buy right before the holiday. Is Halloween different? Are we supposed to decorate a month or more in advance? Or has something else changed?

Still confused...