Halloween 2020-Style

Halloween is my absolute favorite holiday of them all, and it will be here in just a couple days. I love everything about this time of year: the trick or treaters, the candy, haunted houses, horror movies, and even the Celtic history behind the celebration, where they lit bonfires and wore costumes to ward of ghosts.

And this year was going to be extra special because Halloween falls on a Saturday and will occur on the night of a full moon. An ideal situation.

I say, “was,” because with the public health situation that we currently find ourselves in it is unlikely that very many people will be celebrating this rare concurrence of events. There won’t be the parties or gatherings that have marked previous years as people this time around choose to stay home and observe the date quietly on their own.

Which is a huge loss.

Personally, I think kids should be allowed to go out on Halloween. Think about it. They will all be wearing masks anyway. Except for a few clumps of children that occasionally gather on the same porch at the same time, they will all be spaced out to a socially acceptable distance as they run around out of control throughout the various neighborhoods. And, since past tragedies have eliminated handmade food and unsealed packaging, the candies are all individually wrapped as well as sealed inside a larger bag, so there is little chance of contamination due to contact with other people.

If you are already sending your child out to wander the streets in the night, wearing dark clothing and masks that impair their vision, to knock on the doors of people they have never met, how could it possibly be any more dangerous this year? Let the kids have their fun. They’ve been cooped up for about eight months now, they need a chance to blow off some steam.

And the parents could probably use a night off as well. How long has it been since you had an evening to yourself with no screaming, bored, whining rugrats crawling around underfoot? Probably too long.

My situation is a little different. My kids are all grown up. (Physically. Mentally, I still really worry about those two.) They haven’t done the trick-or-treating thing in many years. Instead, they typically hang out with friends and do whatever it is that young adults do on their own. I don’t know exactly what that is, anymore. I try not to think too hard about what it is they are actually doing since I remember what I was doing when I was in my early twenties, and there is just absolutely no excuse for that kind of behavior.

They should be ashamed of themselves.

This year, however, they will be hanging out at home with mom and dad. It’s just going to be one more day where my two grown kids are in the house with me all evening, without a break. Just like yesterday. Just like the day before, and the day before, and the day before, and…

Everybody loses.

All I can say is, thank god for television and alcohol.

Can you imagine if this pandemic had occurred before we had electronic distractions to take our minds off of the fact that we have been spending time with the same couple of people nonstop for the past six months? What if the only entertainment we had was watching the paint peel off of the walls and (god forbid) talking to each other? I think I would have murdered my entire family by now.

This Halloween, there won’t even be any kids trick-or-treating in my neighborhood to add some excitement to the evening. No smiling faces. No begging for candy. And no handmade costumes where I have to try and guess, “Are you a zombie, or a hobo, or did you get hit by a car before you got here?”

The lack of trick-or-treaters in my area isn’t just because of the pandemic, however. It also has to do with my location. Stray kids don’t usually come to my house as I live out in the middle of nowhere and it takes about half an hour to walk from one house to the next. I actually haven’t had a trick-or-treater turn up at my door since 2011 when I moved to my present residence. Still, every year I watch the front door hopefully, waiting to see if some lost waif is going to brave the darkness and the distance to ring my doorbell and hold out his empty candy bag. I long for the day I can smile at the wandering child and tell him,

“I don’t have any candy. What are you doing out here, and where the hell are your parents?”

I mean, seriously. It would take a lunatic to allow their kid to wander around in my neighborhood hoping for someone to hand out candy. It’s like child abuse.

Happy Halloween!

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