Conjuring Enchantment Via Tube Slide: Halloween 2020
I parked my ass on a redwood lounge chair, perched at the edge of my front porch. On my right armrest sat a tall cardboard to-go cup full of Starbucks pumpkin spice latte. I’d purchased the sweet autumnal caffeinated beverage at a drive-through window as a reward for having braved the germs and run masked errands earlier that afternoon.
I was dressed all in black from my tiny witch’s hat hair fascinator to my faux leather leggings, except for my feet which were jammed into pale brown suede Ugg boots with the furry lining because it was cold and they were the warmest and coziest shoes that I had. I usually never wore them outside. They were not particularly my style. But I wore them all the time inside in the fall and winter because (before the perimenopause and its attendant hot flashes started to hit) my body seemed to share the same average annual temperature as Finland and I was not a big fan of that.
I was ready to give out Halloween candy and had inadvertently chosen a costume that could perhaps be best described as “Basic Witch[1].”
On my left armrest sat a bottle of hand sanitizer. There was a mask across my lower face and my hands were squeezed into a pair of plastic disposable gloves. It was Halloween 2020 and things were about to get weird. Despite the fact that earlier in the month data from Johns Hopkins indicated that COVID-19 cases had surpassed 40 million worldwide and the US was seeing the highest rates of new cases in months as the fall and winter holidays approached, we were scrambling for ways to try to keep traditions alive. So, on our street at least we were going to go ahead with Trick-or-Treat. But we were going to do it from six feet away.
There were various approaches employed by my neighbors. Small groups of child COVID pods were herded up and down the sidewalks by parents anxiously trying to ensure that each group kept their distance from other groups. Some houses bagged up crinkly plastic parcels of candy and placed them on folding card tables on the sidewalk with invitations for the kids to each pick up their own bag so that little germy fingers didn’t intermingle within communal bowls. The candy givers sat some ways up their driveways and waved at the candy recipients. Other neighbors set up ropes and clipped treats to them with clothes pins. Some lobbed candy at the kids with low velocity sling shots. The majority of the neighbors, however, employed some type of PVC pipe tube slide system.
We set up one of those. I purchased a big piece of plumbing pipe from a home improvement store and duct taped it to the hand rail going up the steps to my front porch. Then, I cracked a bunch of those glow-in-the-dark sticks and taped them to the tube to illuminate it once darkness fell. It would have been great too, if the candy I had purchased had fit in the tube, but alas, the packages of M&Ms kept getting stuck halfway down. So I resorted to placing candy on the mesh part of my pool skimmer and gently wavering it down the stairs so the little ghouls and goblins could squirrel it away in their bags and pumpkin-shaped buckets. It was a different approach to the holiday and also the most fun we’d had in months. And it taught me that, while it may be impossible to transmute lead into gold, one can use a kind of mental alchemy to take forced limitations and make experiences far more enchanting than they otherwise would be.
How did you do Halloween in 2020? Are there any traditions from that year that you’ve kept alive?
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[1] If you are reading this far in the future, telling someone that they were “a basic bitch” was a way of telling a woman that the things she liked were dumb. Usually these things were mainstream—pumpkin spice lattes and Ugg boots were frequently cited examples of basic shit. But, in the case of the PSL, I’m going to say it’s mainstream for a reason. That shit is awesome and you will have to pry it from my cold, dead hands. Don’t yuck my yum. Don’t yuck anyone’s yum if the yum isn’t hurting anyone.
