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At any big-box store, you can find the annual holiday mash-up now on garish display: Halloween costumes are stacked next to the decorative turkey napkins and pre-lit Christmas trees.

It's time to celebrate the Halloween-Thanksgiving-Hanukkah-Christmas-New-Year season!

This year, most merchants are optimistic, predicting strong sales throughout the peak shopping period. Let's start with Halloween, with its sales of costumes, candy, cards and pumpkins. This year, the National Retail Federation predicts Halloween revenues will hit $7.4 billion, up from last year's $6.9 billion.

Decorations will drive much of that spending, up to $2 billion, the trade group says. A generation ago, Dad might carve a pumpkin into a jack-o'-lantern, and that was that. Today, front yards are filled with electronic bubbling cauldrons, animated jumping spiders and talking witches.

Another positive factor for retailers is that Oct. 31 falls on a Friday, which allows for more Halloween parties. And this is good news for party-throwers: Candy will cost, at most, just a few pennies more than last year.

"Halloween candy price inflation has slowed tremendously over the past couple of years, thanks to depressed raw sugar and refined sugar beet prices," IHS Global Insight U.S. economist Chris Christopher said in his analysis of the holiday.

Icing on your pumpkin cake: It will be cheaper to drive to those Halloween parties because gasoline prices have dropped dramatically in recent weeks to around $3 a gallon.

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Need one more reason for optimism? Congress is not in session. "Last year's federal government shutdown in the first half of October put a damper on consumer mood in the run-up to Halloween, and more importantly to the holiday retail sales season," Christopher said.

And that's what merchants are really looking for: signs that a good Halloween will lead to an even stronger holiday season. The retail group is predicting a robust increase in spending in the year's final two months.

The NRF's annual Consumer Spending Survey found the average person celebrating Christmas, Kwanzaa and/or Hanukkah will spend $804.42 this year, up nearly 5 percent over last year's actual $767.27.

"Overall, consumers feel better about where they stand compared to a year ago, and as such could find themselves stretching their dollars to give their loved ones a holiday season to remember," Prosper's principal analyst Pam Goodfellow said in a statement.

That prediction feels right to Antoine Kent, who was visiting New York City and shopping for a ninja costume for his godson. He believes the economy is strengthening enough to allow for more spending through the holidays.

"It seems like it's getting a little better each year," Kent said.

For the moment, he only needs to focus on Halloween because his 8-year-old godson was clear: "He said, 'Find me a ninja.' "

In case you are wondering: Yahoo says this year's most searched-for Halloween costumes include Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Frozen princesses.

By Christmas, most shopping lists will shift to electronics. Analysts are predicting the hottest gifts will include iPhone 6s, digital fitness products and video games.

NPR Business Desk intern Robert Szypko contributed to this report.

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holiday season

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To stop the raging Ebola epidemic in West Africa, "we need to pay attention to where the fire is burning."

That means there is no "magic solution," Jim Yong Kim, the head of the World Bank, told NPR's Steve Inskeep during an interview on Morning Edition. So appointing an Ebola czar to monitor the international response isn't going to suddenly stop the outbreak.

Neither will closing the borders between U.S. and the three hardest-hit countries: Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

To Kim, that's not a long-term solution: "It's like you're in your room and the house is on fire, and your approach is to put wet towels under the door. That might work for a while, but unless you put the fire out, you're still in trouble."

"The way to stop this epidemic from coming at an even higher level in the United States is actually try to stop it in its tracks," he says of the many U.S. health workers who have volunteered to go overseas.

He says what's most important is not only getting protocols in place in the United States but in the three hardest hit countries: Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. That means quickly identifying cases and instituting a high level of infection control — not just standard precautions.

"We've got to have very high-quality protective equipment," he says. "When patients get sick we need to provide intensive care."

The good news, he says, is that leaders like President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron has stepped up in their aid. But the response has just been inadequate for an outbreak that dates back to December of last year. "We are only now getting comprehensive plans for how we are going to attack this epidemic," he says.

What's really missing are health workers, he says. "While we can move thing and build structures what we need are skilled health workers who can do all the complicated things you need to stop the epidemic."

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A Glimmer Of Hope: Nigeria May Have Beaten Ebola

Kim pointed to Nigeria to illustrate the level of intervention needed to stop the current outbreak. With the help of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, Nigeria was able to contain the outbreak, with 19 confirmed cases and only seven related deaths.

Still, "it cost them $13 million and more than 200 physicians [and] 600 other health workers," he says. "They had to do 19,000 home visits taking temperatures in order to get it control."

He acknowledges that with nearly 9,000 cases so far, there's a lot of work to be done. Yet he's confident that the international community will be able to stop Ebola — although he stresses that "we've got to move much more quickly."

Jim Yong Kim

ebola

World Bank

The number of men getting vasectomies spiked during the Great Recession, rising one-third from 2006 to 2010, a study finds.

In 2006, 3.9 percent of men said they had had a vasectomy; in 2010, 4.4 percent reported having the surgery. That means an additional 150,000 to 180,000 men per year had vasectomies in each year of the recession.

That squares with earlier research that showed birth rates dropped during the recession, falling 4 percent between 2007 and 2009.

After the recession, man were making less money, were less likely to be working full time, and were less likely to have health insurance, according to the National Survey for Family Growth, which researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College used to come up with the vasectomy numbers.

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They reported their results Monday at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine conference in Hawaii.

OK, so what were women up to? The Weill Cornell researchers didn't look at this, but the survey did ask recession-era women about birth control, and there was no increase in the number of women who got birth control or had sterilization surgery from 2002.

Men typically aren't nearly as apt to embrace sterilization as a form of birth control as are women.

For women who use contraception, 26.6 percent chose tubal sterilization, which is permanent, compared to 27.5 percent for the pill, according to 2010 numbers from the Guttmacher Institute.

But just 10 percent of women said they're relying on their partner's vasectomy to avoid pregnancy, according to Guttmacher.

We'll have to stay tuned to see if guys' seeming embrace of vasectomy was just a recessionary blip, or if they really are saying no (or no mas) to fatherhood.

vasectomies

Birth Control

population

Great Recession

Men's Health

Congolese gynecological surgeon Denis Mukwege has won the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought awarded for his work treating thousands of women who have been victims of rape in his country.

European Parliament President Martin Schultz said in a statement that Mukwege would receive the $65,000 award for "his fight for protection especially of women." Last year's winner, Malala Yousafzai, the teen who was shot by the Taliban for advocating education for girls, received the Nobel Peace Prize earlier this month.

Past winners of the prize, named after Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, include the late South African leader Nelson Mandela and former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

"In many armed conflicts around the world, rape is used as a weapon of war," Schultz said in the statement. Mukwege, he said "decided to help victims in his country" by "[treating] victims of sexual violence who have sustained serious injuries" at his Panzi Hospital in Bukavu in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, on the border with Rwanda.

According to a United Nations report earlier this year, more than 3,600 women have been raped in the DRC in the four years from January 2010 to December 2013.

The New York Times writes:

"Dr. Mukwege is known for his work in one of the most traumatized places in the world. In the hills above Bukavu, where for years there was little electricity or anesthetic, Dr. Mukwege has performed surgery on countless women, some a few steps away from death, who have reached his hospital.

"At the same time, he has campaigned relentlessly to shine a spotlight on the plight of Congolese women, even after an assassination attempt two years ago.

"'It's not a women question; it's a humanity question, and men have to take responsibility to end it,' Dr. Mukwege said in an interview last year. 'It's not an Africa problem. In Bosnia, Syria, Liberia, Colombia, you have the same thing.'"

Sakharov Prize

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Democratic Republic of Congo