Is Halloween Canceled? Expert Advice for a Safe, Fun, and Creative Holiday
In Connie Chang’s household in Jersey City, New Jersey, the run-up to Halloween started off much like it would during a non-pandemic year. Her three children, newly obsessed with all things Harry Potter, spent the last few weeks hotly debating amongst themselves who should dress as which character. “They each wanted to be Harry,” Chang says. “We finally negotiated it down to two Harrys and one Ron.” Then things took a turn: “They started wondering pretty loudly how Halloween would go, given the social distancing rules.”
Chang and her family are not alone in wondering how, if at all, it might be possible to safely celebrate Halloween this year. “Many traditional Halloween activities can be high-risk for spreading viruses,” warns a new set of guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Topping that list: traditional trick-or-treating, crowded costume parties, and visits to indoor haunted houses.
Is trick-or-treating totally out? “I think, what the CDC is really saying is that you shouldn’t do traditional trick-or-treating this year, because there are so many variables we can’t control for,” says Dr. Natasha Bhuyan, the West Coast medical director for health care provider One Medical. “The only thing we can control for is our own behaviors.”
The same rules apply: Wear a mask, don’t socialize indoors with people outside of your bubble, stay six feet away from others, wash your hands, and stay up to date about rates of infection in your neighborhood.
She also cautions parents who might be inclined to take a calculated risk for a special occasion. That risk may be higher than they realize, because more people are, just like them, making the same exception. “This happened with Labor Day, this happened with Memorial Day, this happened with Independence Day,” Bhuyan says. “Any time there’s that one holiday event and everybody feels nostalgia for previous years, that’s when we see an increase in cases.”
The most important thing to remember is that the virus doesn’t discriminate between regular days and holidays, points out Dr. Aaron Milstone, associate hospital epidemiologist and professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. The same rules still apply: Wear a mask, don’t socialize indoors with people outside of your bubble, stay six feet away from others, wash your hands, stay up to date about rates of infection in your neighborhood, and let that data inform your appetite for risk.
Does all of this mean that Halloween 2020 is canceled? Hardly, assures Milstone. “Halloween is a time for families to be creative [and] I think this year is no different,” he told us. “People need to be creative about how they can safely foster a fun environment for their kids.”
How Neighborhoods Are Reinventing the Halloween Experience for the COVID-19 Reality
The ability to maintain a six-foot distance from others remains a real concern, especially in urban areas where sidewalks on All Hallows’ Eve are often swamped with revelers standing shoulder-to-shoulder. Halloween is on a Saturday this year, Milstone notes. To keep crowds at bay, it might make sense to spread trick-or-treating hours out over the course of a day, or even the entire weekend. “This age group goes at this time, this age group goes at that time, you know?” Milstone says, imagining a staggered, shift-like system.
Individual communities could also designate certain streets as trick-or-treating territory, limiting the number of houses children can visit. “What do kids want out of Halloween? They want candy,” Milstone points out. “If each [neighborhood] came together and said, ‘We’re going to set up a little table in front of [these houses], and in between 7 and 8 p.m., the kids can walk around our block and we’re going to give each kid a bag of candy, kids would get dressed up and they’d be just as excited.”
Of course, creating COVID-cautious environments requires the coordination of an entire community. That’s easier said than done, but some neighborhoods are going the distance. In Evanston, Illinois, Betsy Finesilver Haberl’s residential street is planning a socially-distanced block party.
“We hope to have some outdoor entertainment set up in a way to keep people safe,” Finesilver Haberl says. It’ll be a Halloween-themed repeat of a block party that took place earlier this summer, which featured a live band and proved a rollicking success. “Everyone wore masks, brought their own blankets/chairs, and sat/danced at least 6 feet apart,” Finesilver Haberl recounts. “We may have the band come back for Halloween, and want to find a way to set up a screen for a kid-friendly movie showing.” There’s still a question mark as to how to hand out candy, but Finesilver Haberl said the neighborhood is leaning toward asking families to bring their own treats to enjoy.
Still Want to Trick-or-Treat? Tips for Doing It Safely
If, after considering the level of spread in your community, you’re comfortable going door-to-door, Milstone suggests integrating a Halloween-ified face mask into a child’s costume. That means a real face mask, not a plastic character mask or pull-on, ninja-like neck gaiter. “Those really don’t do much good with [particles] flying out of peoples’ mouths or into their mouth,” he stresses.
He also suggests some sort of candy-catching apparatus that could help retrieve candy while maintaining distance from others: “Part of a costume could be something that you extend with your arm,” Milstone spitballs. “You have a net or something that you’re holding out that someone could drop something into.” The point is, he continues, there are ways to reimagine costumes with safety in mind.
On the candy-giving front, inventiveness may also prove a major asset. Some people are planning to hang candy from clotheslines. In Washington, D.C., Jackie Ludden Nardelli’s family is creating a 10-foot-long candy luge made of PVC piping. It’ll be painted black, wrapped in “mummy cloth,” and adorned with battery-operated lights that glow a lurid orange. “We have a few weeks to figure out the correct angle so the candy goes down without any trouble,” Nardelli says. Her device seems to be in good company — a growing number of similar DIY luges can be found online. One family even fashioned a candy-delivering zipline apparatus. Milstone approves of such creativity, although he cautions creators to make sure their devices don’t require trick-or-treaters to touch the same surface over and over.
As far as the candy goes, there’s at least one piece of good news: Milstone said you needn’t worry about sanitizing the surfaces of every candy single wrapper. But regular hand-washing — especially before you put anything in your mouth — is smart. “The probability of something in the environment getting you sick is probably low,” he said. “If you wash your hands, you make it a lot lower.”
Or Try a Clever, Creative Trick-or-Treat Alternative
Of course, the safest activities continue to be ones that happen at home or virtually, says Bhuyan. Connie Chang’s family has officially decided against venturing out into the neighborhood for Halloween, but her 9-year-old daughter came up with a unique solution: trick-or-treating at home, with candy caches stationed in front of each doorway in the house.
“We’ll have a plastic pumpkin, two Easter baskets, and a Halloween-themed Wegmans’ shopping bag as the containers,” Chang says. Each container will house a different genre of treat — hard candies, gummies, chocolate, etc! — to mimic trick-or-treating as it might have been in previous years, where different homes offer goodies of varying appeal. “In my parents’ neighborhood, for example, there’s a house that always gives out full-sized chocolate candy bars!” Chang says. There are also plans to make “spooky drinks” and screen It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. “They’ll miss seeing their little cousin who lives nearby,” Chang says. “But I think, because there are three of them, we can make the evening festive enough that they’ll be OK.”
In Shalimar, Florida, Atina Rizk Stavropoulos isn’t letting Halloween get away this year. “We are HUGE Halloween fans. Temporary-graveyard-in-the-front-of-the-house-type people,” she said of her family, which includes twin 4-year-old boys. “They’re organizing an indoor Easter egg-style Halloween scavenger hunt, with candy in paper bags squirreled away around the house.” Stavropoulos and her husband also intend to don costumes for an evening full of jump scares. “We’re going to hide costumes all over and after my husband jumps out for one, he’ll slip away and put on another costume in a separate room while I distract [the kids] with more candy finds,” Stavropoulos says. “Ghost, pirate, werewolf, etc. There may be a treasure map involved, depending on how much energy I have.”
Meanwhile, in Rockville, Maryland, Iris Hartley is weighing the possibility of taking her two young children trick-or-treating, but only at a single house: Grandma’s. “I’m considering having them walk around the block and stopping only at my mom’s house over and over again,” she said. “Perhaps with Grandma wearing a different costume each time.”
Others are going virtual with their celebrations. In Denver, Colorado, Heather Kistler Kinz’s crew, which includes a toddler, is “trick-or-treating by Facetiming everyone we know, saying ‘hi’ and telling jokes,” she said. “We also might just have a fire and s’mores and watch a 3-year-old-level scary movie.”
In the end, how you choose to celebrate Halloween this year will be a personal decision. It’s hard to issue blanket advice about the absolute best way to participate in the holiday, because there is no absolute best way; the COVID-19 situation varies too greatly from place to place. Milstone encourages families to read the CDC guidelines and monitor the situation in their area before making any decisions.
Would he allow his own children to go door to door in his neighborhood in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland? “The answer to that is ‘yes,’ but I would follow all these things that we have talked about,” he says. “In the U.S., people are smart and creative and innovative. If they want to make this work and do it safely, there’ll be ways to do this.”
Find more information on celebrating safely: Halloween & Costume Association’s 2020 Resource Page
How will you and your family be celebrating Halloween this year?