Every Halloween, my husband and I try to be really good neighbors by making sure that one of us is at home by 5 p.m. to hand out candy to trick-or-treaters. My husband believes that it’s one of our civic duties like voting or paying taxes. But I think that’s just his attempt to guilt me into watching the front door while he goes to a 5:30 p.m. spin class at the gym. Every year he promises that he’ll take his turn answering the door afterwards so I can get in a workout, but by the time he’s back from his class and showered, most of the trick-or-treaters are back at home and I’m too tired to work out. Don’t worry — I’m totally onto his antics.
This year due to COVID-19, towns have been discouraging traditional trick-or-treating. Our town had a few COVID-compliant suggestions to replace door-to-door candy giveaways, but I wanted to make sure that I still had Halloween candy in case we did get some trick-or-treaters. Last year, we didn’t have too many, but maybe being stuck at home for 7 months would motivate some parents to take their little ones out on a Halloween walk on a Saturday evening and I wanted to be prepared.
So I made some candy sticks:
Now this wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be — wrapping orange duct tape around fun-sized bags of M&Ms and BBQ skewers doesn’t always work out the way you hoped it would — duct tape rips candy wrappers, scotch tape isn’t strong enough and masking tape, well, it just didn’t look as holiday festive as the orange duct tape. So I regrouped and figured snack baggies might work, that way I wouldn’t be ripping open wrappers with tape.
It worked, but the snow we got yesterday made it a little difficult to keep the sticks upright and dry. But at least I had something out there for possible trick-or-treaters!
And we must have had a few customers, because when I went out at 9 p.m. to check — three sticks were missing! Now I guess I’ll just have to eat the rest of them…
Notes from a Self Quarantine 