Halloween should be cancelled this year. It seems odd to even consider going full-tilt into a night of adults and children walking along crowded sidewalks, moving from house to house, gathering candy, sneezing, and tempting fate.
If it’s difficult to socially distance in a grocery store, it’s next to impossible on that night. Face coverings are part of any child’s costume and they won’t combine well with the face masks those kids already wear all day in daycare and schools.
Children, particularly excited ones, don’t manage any kind of mask that well. Doubling up means taking them off. And kids are far more social than adults, particularly when they’re sugared up on Oct. 31 and competing with their little friends for a fatter bag of treats, and then doing that wriggling-and-running-away thing.
“You get right back here, Lucas! Stop hitting Noah with your candy sack. Chloe, are you going to throw up?” I don’t actually enjoy Halloween at the door, getting everyone’s costume wrong. “Great elephant!” I say. “I’m actually a mouse,” a small voice says.
Very few people are going to attach long plumbing pipes to their porch step railings to shoot out candy one by one. They don’t sell grabbers sufficiently long-handled to reach appropriately distanced children. The medical advice is that people crowded in front of candy cauldrons or those black coffins people put up — surely coffins are too ghoulish in a pandemic — end up packed together.
Then they’re showered with chocolate bars, lollipops, gum, candy corn, caramels, mints, Twizzlers, fruit chews, Toblerones and chocolate kisses, along with various other sugary horribles and a few apples from people who haven’t heard those razor stories.
Aside from setting a wretched foundation for a healthy diet, it’s a free-for-all for families and for COVID-19, the very definition of a risk.
Given the rising case numbers we’re seeing, people are staying at home now, trying to maybe bend our terrible curve a little. Why not maintain that effort in order to prepare for the holiday that really counts, Christmas?
Christmas isn’t just one day. It lasts a month or two, especially if you’re the person — okay, woman — in charge of presents, liquor, virtual cards and calls to distant relatives, crass décor, that dreadful music, family dinner, wrapping, stuffing Christmas stockings, buying cheap awful outdoor lights to replace the cheap awful outdoor lights of 2019, visiting relatives, real tree vs. fake tree, finding a tree stand oh just use a bucket, slipping on ice and coping with the story of Santa.
Make that the stories of Santa, plural. There are a lot of stories extant and not all of them match. “Where’s Ms. Claus?” “Why don’t they have children?” (Yes, I will be guilting you for the Star Christmas Fund this year. Think of kids with parents out of work! The sweet hope in their eyes! Fork it over, readers, this year more than ever.)
Christmas is a snow castle with its four corners planted on Nov. 1 and 30, and Dec. 1 and 31. It is a massive construction, so all-encompassing that yearly, people consider changing their vague religions to one that doesn’t celebrate Christmas at all.
Halloween is a shotgun shack by comparison. Why take a giant risk for two hours of one orange-and-black night and end up with the coronavirus and its long tail of illness just before the bigger, better, redder event?
Ask children which holiday they’d prefer. Mention candy canes and presents. Santa’s list, which he is checking right now for little boys and girls letting their face masks droop.
You can engineer the right answer.
Or invent new holidays. Nov. 1 is World Vegan Day when everyone stays home and eats succulents and soy dust. Nov. 12 is World Pneumonia Day when everyone stays home and hopes they don’t get pneumonia. Or other breathing ailments. Nov. 19 is World Toilet Day, which we celebrate all year really. Everything’s up for grabs. We’ll come up with costumes.
You can’t always get what you want, in this case Halloween. What you need is Christmas, a great holiday for teaching children to be kind, generous, and theoretically well-mannered.
Heather Mallick is a columnist for the Toronto Star.
