2020 is on its way out and good riddance.
It’s been the scariest year for many of us. Natural disasters, unnatural job and business losses and too many heartbreaking deaths in long-term care settings, all fuelled by COVID-19, have made everyone unsettled.
And Halloween, that pseudo-scary time with a promise of some respite from all the doom and gloom, is just around the corner. Almost every kid has been dreaming about Halloween for weeks, even months, imagining their costumes and how many treats they’ll get and who they’ll go Trick or Treating with. Many people are still putting up imaginative Halloween displays. But will the virus stop this fun time for kids?
Festivities and celebrations are something we take for granted—until this year. In the old days, they gave people a chance to celebrate their harvests, bring brightness to a long-cooped-up winter or herald the beginning of a joyous spring. And of course, a chance to exorcise all those scary spirits on October 31st.
But it looks like things may be grinding to a halt. Those wretched COVID-19 numbers are going up again, so public health officials are advising: no Halloween parties, no Trick or Treating in COVID ‘hotspots’.
Where does that leave the kids? As confused, probably, as are many adults. Everyone is trying to gauge the situation.
What happens in municipalities where there is not yet a stop sign to Trick or Treating? With the pandemic the bizarre social experiment that it is, it is causing some dilemmas. Should everyone talk to their neighbours to see what they are doing? Or will they risk going down in the annals of the Great Pandemic of 2020 as the ONLY person on their street who had the audacity to hand out treats? Will they be featured on our local news outlets? Or will people ‘region-hop’ for an old-fashioned Trick or Treating? With directives changing so rapidly, we have to sift all the information we get from health and government authorities and use some common sense to see what everyone does on October 31st.
This year our Halloween will be different, but we still want life to go on.
There are all kinds of ideas for a safer Halloween: people are installing big pipes to slide the candy down to waiting ghosts and goblins; they are thinking about using hockey sticks or tongs to make the candy transfer safer. One young mom plans to hide Halloween candies throughout the house, put on some eery Halloween music and turn off the lights with much drama and fanfare. Then her kids will wield flashlights to find their treats—indoors.
Or maybe youngsters can share their Halloween evening with one friend.
For the first time ever, our family will be doing our Halloween ‘in-house’. We’ll put on our costumes and hand out treats for our grandchildren from our front and back doors. A mini spooky adventure in the backyard will lead the kids to a few treat stations, ‘peopled’ by many garden gnomes (courtesy of their Great-Opa) along with a few rubber spiders, a couple of styrofoam gravestones and a skull or two.
If you want a bigger activity, local churches and municipalities are worth checking out, too, for various safety-minded Halloween events and drive-throughs.
But the person who displayed the giant numbers ‘2020’ in his front yard as the scariest thing he could think of had it right.
That’s the spirit to emulate. We have to laugh in spite of the tears of 2020 as we try to have a happy and safe Halloween.
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