I had a hard time getting into the Halloween spirit this year. I don’t leave the house or go to stores as often as I used to, so without all the visual cues like paper skeletons or orange and black decorations, the holiday just kind of snuck up on me.
We didn’t set out any Halloween decorations this year or make a jack-o-lantern. I guess nobody was interested. With Mason away in college and Morgan being pulled in multiple directions by school, choir, band, and being a teenager in general, there really wasn’t anyone around to decorate for. There’s a 30-gallon storage tub out in the garage without a lid, full of Halloween decorations. A couple of times last month I considered pulling out a few of the plastic skulls and tombstones and setting them up, but I never got around to it. They’ll keep for another year. There were no baked Halloween snacks to take to work, no costumes for the kids to wear to school, and no one interested in watching a scary movie or two. That stuff’s gone, and I miss it.
A week before Halloween, Susan and I checked our our local Spirit Halloween store. The lack of available product was shocking. Large sections of the store were completely empty. All of the animatronics they usually have on display were completely gone, along with the display units. Long stretches of wall space were bare, with five or six masks available on a wall designed to hold a hundred. It’s no secret that retailers try to time it to where they won’t be stuck with tons of merchandise after a holiday passes, but I was literally flabbergasted at how few masks and costumes Spirit Halloween had available a full week before Halloween.
And I’m not singling Spirit Halloween out. We also visited Party City, who didn’t have much more in the way of masks hanging on their peg hooks. When I visited Big Lots halfway through the month I noticed they had more Christmas decorations out for sale than Halloween goodies.
The COVID pandemic did a number on trick-or-treating last year, and it seemed to me like retailers were betting that 2021 would be a repeat of last year.
They were wrong.
Last weekend around 5:45 p.m., I got my first group of trick-or-treaters. By 6 p.m. I’d had three groups — more than we had all of last year, I think. Susan (who was out of town with Morgan) left behind a bowl of Smartees, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and miniature Heath Bars to hand out in case any kids stopped by. In the beginning I handed each visiting child two pieces of candy, but the kids just kept coming, and eventially I had to start rationing once I could see the bottom of the bowl. By 8 p.m. the bowl was empty and I quickly ran to the garage to grab the boxes of General Mills individual monster cereal packs I picked up earlier in the month and used those to refill the bowl. I also had a dozen pairs of sunglasses that I gave out. (Why I had a dozen sunglasses to hand out is a different blog post.)
According to my Ring doorbell we had 20 groups of trick-or-treaters visit the house. That’s more than we’ve had in a decade, I think. The night was a non-stop barrage of princesses, witches, ninjas, and all sorts of characters. By the end of the night I was wishing I had put out more decorations. Maybe next year, kids.
Same here, I usually go all out decorations and playing Halloween cartoons on the house. This year all the decorations and the movie projector are still in the basement. I even had several people asking why I didn’t decorate this year. Last year we had roughly 60 kids show up, down from around 80. But I never like to be caught off guard and prepared 120 bags of candy. We had 113 show up. This made my day, I guess the rumors of the death of Halloween were greatly exaggerated.