Trick or What?
Pandemic Halloween is a mixed bag all around
NEW YORK – Roving grown-ups 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 different in the pandemic as parents and the people who provide Halloween fun navigate a myriad of restrictions and safety concerns.
Some were looking extra-forward to Halloween this year because it falls on a Saturday.
Decisions are outstanding in many areas on whether to allow kids to go door to door in search of candy, with Los Angeles first banning trick-or-treating, then downgrading its prohibition to 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 of Webster Groves, neighbors go all out to decorate their houses and yards with spooky skeletons, tombstones and jacko’-lanterns as up to 1,000 people pack the blocked-off street to carry on an old tradition: Tell a joke, get a treat.
Not this year.
“We plan to decorate the house as usual so families can feel the Halloween spir
it on their evening walks,” said Kirsten Starzer, mom to two kids, ages 11 and 15. “We will put up a sign that says, ‘See you next year!’”
Along the Pacific Coast about 25 miles south of San Francisco, this Halloween was meant to be a milestone for the Half Moon Bay Art & Pumpkin Festival. The two-day event, now canceled, usually draws up to 300,000 people from around the world.
There’s still some Halloween fun to be had in New York’s Sleepy Hollow more than 200 years after Washington Irving published
his classic story about the headless horseman. But the undead, evil and insane who usually entertain at Philipsburg Manor won’t be present for the annual horror walk-through Horseman’s Hollow.
It, too, is a pandemic casualty.
While the future is uncertain for trick-or-treating, Americans have been stocking up on candy. U.S. sales of Halloween-themed chocolate and candy were up 70% over 2019 in the four weeks ending Aug. 9, according to the National Confectioners Association.
On the Halloween haunts front, Brett Hays of the Haunted Attraction Association, said roughly half the attractions among his 800 or so members will not be able to run this year due to the pandemic.
“It’s so uneven in terms of regulations right now,” said Hays, the group’s president. “Whatever local agencies have been put in charge of this really are clamoring to try to get a hold of what’s going on and be able to handle it.”
“Nobody’s going to have a great year,” Hays said. “There’s no doubt about it.”