How was Karen’s Halloween party?

How did everyone enjoy Halloween? In our Jupiter, Florida neighborhood, not a single mask was observed (other than costume masks). Substantial gatherings were observed in the next neighborhood over (Jupiter Heights), with candy for the kids and what appeared to be booze for the adults. Children were invited to grab candy from common bowls, thus risking the spread of COVID-19 via surface contamination that the righteous have been fighting for 20 months with obsessive disinfection.

(How is the Coronagod punishing the wicked unmasked partyers of Florida? The state is tied for lowest daily case rate among all U.S. states (NYT), at 9 per 100,000 (compare to 44 in Minnesota, 50 in Colorado, and 89 in Alaska).)

Meanwhile, email addressed to a Bethesda, Maryland neighborhood:

While we can’t have our traditional party in the Bent Branch courtyard …

Trick or Treating: In order to facilitate safe trick or treating for neighborhood kids on Halloween (Sunday, October 31st), we are providing recommendations that allow everyone to maintain distance but still participate in this most favorite tradition. Below please find a list of ideas for neighbors who wish to pass out candy, but using alternatives to doing a candy bowl (that all the children reach into)…

Purchase and pre-stuff Halloween baggies…

“Candy sticking” – purchase popsicle sticks that you can tape the candy to and stick along your front walkway [link to photo below]

With so many people having been at home for 1.5 years, my impression is that many more houses are profusely decorated, both in Maskachusetts and here in Florida. From Newton, MA, last week:

I’m playing around with a Canon EOS R5 camera. Here are a few tests from last night in Jupiter, Florida (RF 50/1.8 STM lens):

Related:

  • “Get the candy bowl ready. Dr. Fauci says Halloween is a go this year” (NPR): “I think that, particularly if you’re vaccinated, you can get out there and enjoy it,” Fauci told CNN’s State of the Union this weekend. … “This is a time that children love. It’s a very important part of the year for children,” he said. HealthyChildren.org recommended that families stick to outdoor trick-or-treating and doing so in small groups. For handing out candy and other goodies, the website recommended sitting outside and lining up individually prepackaged treats for children to take.

9 thoughts on “How was Karen’s Halloween party?

  1. GB: Amazing link. Here’s another one about a German Opera singer:

    https://news.in-24.com/coronavirus/162691.html

    In case that site is deplorable, the thoroughly woke Bavarian Radio reports exactly the same, but in German:

    https://www.br.de/nachrichten/kultur/corona-nebenwirkung-saengerin-bettina-ranch-erhebt-vorwuerfe,SjGOJqy

    Her neurologist told her about side effects: “If I were forced to report everything, I could close my practice.” So much for vaccine injury statistics …

  2. Where I used to live in New Jersey, it seems from my FB feed that most of the people celebrating Halloween this year with costumes and so forth were adults over the age of 30. I have reports that some people had no trick-or-treaters at all, despite preparation and decoration welcoming them. I attribute this to two things:

    1) COVID fear.
    2) Neighbor fear.

    Trunk-or-treat was the nail in the coffin of Halloween where I used to live. As a child, I went out for years, sometimes late into the night well after dark, with all my friends. At least two years we changed costumes and went for a second trip through the neighborhood. I used to live in northern NJ in a solidly middle-class town, and we’d always have *dozens to hundreds* of kids in our neighborhood (and from surrounding neighborhoods) who would make the trek and it was a festive and fun holiday for everyone.

    When Trunk-or-Treat convinced everyone that their neighbors were people to be FEARED despite living right next to them, and that kids should only celebrate Halloween in the parking lot of a police station or a local school, all of that neighborhood feel was gradually extinguished.

    Now my friends in Jersey tell me that no kids showed up for Halloween, so they’ve got bags of excess candy to eat or give away for the next few months. I said to one of them: “We’ve become a society increasingly shackled by fear. When I was kid, even though I might not have ‘loved’ my neighbors, I didn’t think they were potentially dangerous people I wouldn’t want my kids to visit for trick-or-treating. Times have changed.”

    • I’m glad to hear your kids had a good time. I guess there are still some normal people left in the world, congratulations.

    • Addendum: One of my fondest memories of Halloween as a kid happened at my elementary school, which was still a pretty good school in the 1970s: all the kids, parents and teachers had a big pre-Halloween costume show and contest and the entire auditorium was reserved for an afternoon for the proceedings and contest. I wanted a robot costume and my Dad and I built a fantastic thing with boxes, big sections of rubber duct accordion type material for the arms and legs, rubber gloves, etc., etc. painted it metallic silver and then…for the coup: my father built a power supply and wired it up to lights and a numerical keypad that he scavenged from some piece of IBM mainframe equipment, all powered by a 12V battery. You could walk up to my costume and push the buttons on the keypad and the lights would blink. It was a HOT costume both in terms of the response and also to wear – the ventilation was not that great, we had to punch some holes in the “head section” to allow more air because I was worried I’d suffocate inside it! But after that it was great! I had a huge haul of candy that year, walking around with my neighbors. I did a little “robot dance” and told people to push the buttons.

      Magic! Absolute magic! Fun days.

      Trunk or Treat sucketh by comparison.

  3. Those Walmart decorations look so much better on a $4000 EOS R5 than a $1000 EOS RP & the Greenspun gootube channel is overflowing with videos from it.

  4. No problem in my neighborhood here in So Cal. Hordes of kids for a couple hours. Was hoping to have leftover candy to feast on but that’s not happening.

  5. I live in Baltimore, not so far up the road from Bethesda. People here did Trick Or Treating normally and I don’t recall seeing more than one family wearing a mask outdoors. Some apartment building may have hypochondriacs in it, but I wouldn’t take that as very representative of anything.

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