America’s Children Can Dream of Halloween Again

Kids can have part of their childhoods back.

I’ve spent a good percentage of this pandemic wondering how we would all look back on it someday, when we’ve survived it, if we’ve survived. What will be the habits that last? How will we commemorate it? What are the artifacts that remind us of it? What images will conjure up this unprecedented time in our lives, and in American history?

On that last front, I often think of last Halloween. Last Halloween, we were of course still right in the thick of the pandemic: Before vaccines, and also before the huge Christmas/New Years surge. People were still being extremely careful. (Except for those who never were, obviously.) But I, like a millions of other parents, still wanted my children to have a Halloween. Halloween is a massive night for any kid, an excuse to dress up as something cool, to see all sorts of strange sights and to ingest a metric ton of candy without your parents making you stop. Depriving my children of Halloween, during a year when they had been deprived of so much, felt cruel. I wanted to give them a Halloween, at least.

So people improvised. Kids wore masks under their masks. Houses left their candy out on the sidewalk rather than on their front door. Some people went Trick-or-Treating hours earlier, or even at lunchtime…