We actually got more visitors than we had in previous years.
My wife Pepper Mill got Halloween-themed ziplock bags and filled them with sealed treats and disinfected the outside of the lot, and we put them on a table outside to let the kids picked them up themselves. They were honest and took one apiece. We got about twenty visitors.
I decorated two pumpkins. This year I didn’t carve them, but drew faces on with magic marker and added yarn for hair, held in place with floral staplers and silicone glue. This stood up to the snow that fell, and my brushing it off. The pumpkins were decorated as Trump and Pence. You could tell the white-haired bland-faced one was Pence because I attached a large fly to his hair with a florist’s staple. Trump wore an “I Voted” sticker.
Pepper Mill was going to carve a Jack o’Lantern, but never got around to doing it, so her undecorated pumpkin sat beside Trump and Pence.
She also made an elaborate display of artificial pumpkins and artificial leaves, all gorilla glued together on a plastic base. We can leave it out as a Thanksgiving decoration.
No different at home - we always keep the lights out. But we live in a neighborhood of widely spaced homes and not many kids.
Earlier in the day, I took my daughter and granddaughter to visit my mom. My niece came with her son who’s a couple of weeks younger than my granddaughter. (They’re both about 2 anna half.) My mom has a fairly big house with a number out outside doors plus a shed, so the adults each took a door and the toddlers went trick-or-treating. They had fun and it wasn’t overwhelming, plus it was easy on the moms, aunts, and grandparents. And it was perfect weather for the little ones.
Pretty much same as usual. We sat out front, near the sidewalk, near our next door neighbors. Was too windy, or else we woulda had a fire. Each couple had a small table in front of us w/ candy.
Probably had about as many trick or treaters as usual. I went inside after about 1.5 hrs - was getting chilly.
We had KitKats, Reese’s, and Almond Joys. KitKats were the clear favorite, w/ AJ a distant 3d. Which worked out well, as they are my fave of the 3!
I didn’t mention we made a big spider web across the front windows, and had a giant hairy spider in it. Carved 4 pumpkins, and had a creepy hanging electronic demon in a prison that yelled “let me out!” in a creepy voice when activated by noise. Spouse and I made paper fox masks, which were cool, I think, but hard to have on while doing anything. Mine also got squished a bit…
For our kids, it was more of a Halloween Weekend, in that they wore their costumes to virtual school on Friday and did the usual school stuff- the 1st grader’s class watched “Coco” together on Zoom, and the 3rd grader did something similar.
Saturday we did a drive-through trick-or-treat thing at our local Lowe’s, and the same on Sunday at our church. Basically they had drive through decorations and costumes on the people, and put bags of candy in the trunk for the kids. We wore masks and didn’t interact much (which was the idea). We also had a movie night on Saturday night where we watched the 2019 animated “Addams Family” movie and ate “mummy dogs”, which are hot dogs wrapped up with biscuit dough and baked such that they look like they’re wrapped in bandages or something, along with some Halloween candy, chips & queso and cut up cucumbers and carrots along with ranch dip. Yesterday was pumpkin painting and today’s making a “Haunted house” (really it’s a repurposed Christmas gingerbread house mold).
The distressing part was that we got MORE in-person trick-or-treaters from our neighborhood (usually the vast majority are black kids from the apartments) than we usually do. Dumb-asses out showing how macho and unafraid/ignorant of coronavirus they are is all I can guess. We ignored the doorbell and knocks.
One funny thing did happen; we have an apartment complex nearby, and a significant percentage of the residents are refugees from various places- Afghanistan, Iraq, etc… (it’s not uncommon to see women in hijabs walking around our neighborhood), and the refugee kids went roaming on Sunday morning at about 11 seeing if anyone had leftover Halloween candy they wanted to “get rid of”. We didn’t answer the door, but our neighbor did, and she posted that on Nextdoor.
It doesn’t. But it’s a pretty clear indicator of whether trick-or-treaters live in the neighborhood or the apartments. It’s unfortunate, but there’s a pretty big ethnic divide between the single family homes and the nearby apartments. Take a look at the racial dot map section for the area I live in- the densely green/orange is the apartments, and the less dense blue part are the single family homes.
It was a slow year. 11 kids. However, I’ve had previous years like this. I live in a very nice neighborhood, but its mostly older folks. We had some turnover in the past few years, and there’s more families, but mostly, the older folks don’t participate, and turn their lights off. On Saturday, when I looked down the street, it was majorly dark, with only a few houses with decorations and lights. I think the darkness had more to do with the low number than the other reasons.
