Ready for Disease-Bearing Trick-or-Treaters

For a while now, I’ve been wondering how to approach giving out candy to kids at Halloween. As the number of COVID cases have been jumping up in Calgary (to the point where we set a new daily record of 622 cases yesterday), I haven’t been sure if trick or treating was actually going to be outlawed this year. It is in Ottawa, according to my boss when I spoke to him yesterday.

One of the ideas that has gained traction on the Internet is the idea of a “candy slide”. It’s a tube of some sort that you put the candy in the top and the kid holds their bag at the bottom, allowing distancing. It’s safer for everybody. I toyed with some different ideas, including running one from the upstairs window before settling on one on the front step. A stop at Home Depot this morning for a section of pipe, some black spray paint and some white rope followed by a bit of work and voila:

The spiderweb will keep the kids at the bottom of the stairs. The slide has been tested and it’s working. Originally I installed it with too shallow an angle and the candy wouldn’t always slide all the way. Miranda did the spiderweb.

Considering how few trick or treaters we got last year, this might all be for nothing. But we’re ready, whatever happens.

Updated

So far, six trick-or-treaters. House looks good, though.

Updated again

Fourteen! Not too bad, considering I thought we might get shut out entirely and we only had 25 last year under normal conditions. Lots of exclamations of “Cool!” when the kids got their candy through the slide.

Considering there might not be a vaccine by this time next year, we’ll keep the slide and the web ready for 2021.

Updated for the final time (?) November first

Some additional thoughts on this Halloween and our attempts to be safe.

• Wrapping the front porch light with orange crepe paper was a good idea. I heard at least one kid exclaim from the street that “that house is all spooky!”
• That having been said, there needs to be some light at the receiving end of the slide. More than one kid missed the candy and had to pick it up off the ground. Part of that was due to not being able to see well. Maybe an LED inside the tube for next year? And a sign saying “Candy Here” wouldn’t be a bad idea.
• Since the kids couldn’t ring the doorbell (thanks to the spiderweb), monitoring approaching kids was important. At first, I set up the Vivint indoor security camera in the front window and then was monitoring it from the Mac in the dining room. It has an ultra wide field of view and was able to cover the whole street well. But the Vivint website uses Flash and would stop every 10 minutes or so and ask “Are you still watching?” I switched to the 6th-gen iPad and FaceTime. I used Ian’s wide-angle lens attachment to widen the field of view. It wasn’t as good as the Vivint camera, but monitoring it from downstairs was way better. Light sensitivity became an issue as the night got dark, but since we have a streetlight at the end of our driveway, it still worked fine. You can see the iPad in the picture of the house above.
• When giving out multiple candies to a child, put them all in the slide at once. If you do one at a time, the kid pulls the sack away before the next candy arrives and it hits the sidewalk.