Trick-or-What? Pandemic Halloween is amixed bag all around the country
Roving grownups NEWYORK— tossing candy at kids waiting on lawns. Drive-thru Halloween haunts. Yard parties instead of block parties and parades. Wider paths through corn mazes.
The family holiday so many look forward to each year is going to look difffffffffffferent in the pandemic as parents andthepeoplewhoprovideHalloween fun navigate a myriad of restrictions and safety concerns.
Some were looking forward toHalloween this year because it fallsona Saturday.
Decisions are outstanding in many areas on whether to allow kids to go door to dooror car trunkto car trunk in parking lots in search of candy, with Los Angeles fifirst banning trick- or-treating, then downgrading its prohibitionto a recommendation.
Other events have been canceled or changed, from California’s Half Moon Bay to New York’s legendary Sleepy Hollow— and points in between.
On a typical Halloween along Clark Avenue in the
St. Louis suburb ofWebster Groves, neighbors go all out to decorate their houses and yardswithspooky skeletons, tombstones and jack-o’-lanterns as up to 1,000 people pack the blocked-offff street to carry on an old tradition: Tell a joke, get a treat.
Not this year. There will likely be no warm bags of popcorn, cups of hot chocolate or cotton candy doled out in exchange for the laughs as residents figure out how to pivot.
“We plan to decorate the house as usual so families can feel theHalloween spirit ontheir eveningwalks,” said Kirsten Starzer, momto two kids, ages 11 and 15.“We will put up a sign that says, `See you next year!’”
About 25 miles south of San Francisco, this Halloween was meant to be amilestone for the Half Moon Bay Art& Pumpkin Festival. The two-day event, now canceled, usually draws up to 300,000peoplefromaround theworld to showoffffparade flfloats and school bands for the holiday.
“Itwas supposedto be our 50th year. I guess we’ll have to celebrate that in 2021,” saidCameron Palmer, a local business owner and president of the festival. “This year we have other things to worry about.”
Thekick-offffeventtheweek before, the Safeway World Championship Giant Pumpkin Weigh-Offffffffffff, will carry on with no public spectators but plenty of humongous orange contestants as the judging goes virtual. With any luck, a potential world record-breaker fromtheU.K. will make it safely to Half Moon Bay. Its grower has a shot at $30,000 if he sets a new record.
There’s still someHalloween fun to be had in Sleepy Hollowmore than 200years afterWashingtonIrvingpublished his story about the headless horsemanwho terrorized a Ichabod Crane. But the undead, evil and insanewhousually entertain at Philipsburg Manor won’t be present for the annual walk-through horror attraction Horseman’s Hollow.
It, too, is apandemic casualty.