Hannah Montana costumes and Star Wars characters will fill the streets of America next Friday night.

But even if you don’t know who Hannah Montana is, there’s likely one aspect of Halloween you thoroughly enjoy, year after year — the candy.

Whether you are a chocolate lover or a hard candy fan, the grocery store aisles are currently offering up a festival of fun. And calories.

But we all believe Halloween is a time to splurge, according to analysis in the national media. Break your diet. Spend the extra money. Dress up and escape the perils of day-to-day life, we all seem to say.

Ironically, this Halloween is expected to be quite the profitable one for costume and candy makers, according to the Retail Federation. Many adults are worried about the economy and looking for a way to escape. Halloween offers just that.

And the candy industry has been a hard one to kick in the gut, historically.

A focus on childhood obesity and an increase in the cases of Type 2 Diabetes contributed to the lowering of candy profits 14 percent between 2001 and 2006, BusinessWeek reported last year.

But the candy industry didn’t flinch and adapted its marketing plan to target those over the age of 12. That’s most of you.

The marketing seems to have worked, at least this Halloween.

But just how much is the candy splurging going to cost you — or your waistline?

The average adult should be consuming approximately 2,000 calories in a day. On Halloween, and the days after, you could easily eat half your day’s limit in pure candy.

Here’s how fast your Halloween splurge can get you there:

One Laffy Taffy rope — 80 calories

Five Reese’s cups (the little, individually wrapped ones, not the big ones) — 220 calories

Two packs of fun-size M&Ms — 180 calories

One regular-sized Snickers — 280 calories

Six Tootsie Roll Midgees — 140 calories

One Blow Pop — 50 calories

One fun-size box of Nerds — 50 calories

That’s 1,000 calories.

But let’s keep going to 2,000.

Four fun-size Milky Way bars — 300 calories

Six pieces of Popeye Candy chews — 60 calories

One regular-sized Nestle Crunch bar — 220 calories

One role of Sweet Tarts — 50 calories

One pack Pixy Sticks (seven straws) — 60 calories

Regular-sized package of Reese’s Cups (the big ones this time) — 260

Nine Chewy Gobstoppers — 50 calories

That’s 2,000.

Hopefully no one will be eating that much candy in one day, but two or three days … well, it could happen.

So as Halloween approaches, you’ll have to decide just how much splurging you’ll allow for yourself and your children.

Unless you are Michael Phelps, who burns calories at superhuman speed, it’s likely that the stock market will rise before your waistline plummets.

Spend your dollars on costumes and decorations, not candy. Obama, Hillary and Sarah Palin costumes are topping the lists for adults this year.

What better way to get away from the stress of the economy and the election than to poke fun at it? Dress up like your favorite presidential candidate when you take the kids out, shake a few hands along the way and pretend you are the wealthy politician vying for the White House. Might as well.

Julie Cooper is the managing editor of The Natchez Democrat. She can be reached at 601-445-3551 or julie.cooper@natchezdemocrat.com.