Social Distancing, Stranger Danger, and The Campaign To Save Halloween
Last week, after months of sadness and worry, I got a promotional email from the Spirit Halloween store and instantly I felt glad to be alive. As in, I literally thought, verbatim, “I’m glad I am alive.”
This week on Twitter there’s been a lot of talk about what Halloween will look like this year. Many people worry there will be no Halloween at all, which is of course ridiculous. For all its long history, Halloween has been under threat (in the 17th century, it was outlawed). Halloween has been threatened by Puritanism, by urbanism, by deforestation, by commercialization, by overprotective parents and Satanic panic and poisoned candy hoaxes, by pranks that go too far and pranks that don’t go far enough. Fear that there may be no Halloween is a Halloween tradition itself.
Meanwhile the Halloween haunt community has been planning their response to the pandemic since the first stay-at-home orders in March. On Halloween Forum, between posts titled “Crows/Ravens I need LOTS of them” and “Fog Distribution — Does Tubing Size Matter,” there’s a thread on “touchless candy delivery systems” ranging from the simple to the sublime. “Could you just manually drop the candy down a chute of some sort?” someone asks. You could. Other solutions include animatronic arms, pulley systems, air cannons, conveyor belts…
