We live in a trick-or-treating mecca. Perhaps the trick-or-treating mecca. Our Denver neighborhood, Central Park, is absolute insanity every October 31. Each year, we estimate (based on our candy count) how many trick-or-treaters we got — and from 2011 through 2016, that number was consistently between 1,000 and 1,250+ trick-or-treaters. You can see the madness for yourself in my time-lapse videos from 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016. For example:
I used to call it #StapletonHalloweenMadness.* That’s because Central Park was, until this year, named “Stapleton,” after the decomissioned airport on whose land we sit. Stapleton International Airport, in turn, was named after Benjamin Stapleton, an ex-mayor of Denver who, alas, was a Ku Klux Klansman. So over the summer, amid the George Floyd protests, the neighborhood officially changed its name to Central Park. Which means our annual Halloween insanity is now #CentralParkHalloweenMadness.
Name change aside, the madness has been slightly less “mad” in recent years. In 2017 and 2018, we “only” got roughly 800–850 trick-or-treaters. That’s obviously still a lot of trick-or-treaters by any normal human standard, but it was a distinct drop-off. I suspect it happened due to some combination of: (a) chilly weather, colder than 2015-16; (b) the holiday being on a Tuesday & Wednesday; (c) the fact that families with young kids are increasingly choosing Central Park’s newer sub-neighborhoods on the north side of I-70; and, relatedly, (d) the fact that more & more kiddos in our southern half of Central Park are “aging out” of trick-or-treating. (Though a lot of our trick-or-treat traffic comes from elsewhere in Denver and Aurora.)
Anyway, last year was our record-low Halloween, in more ways than one. The weather wasn’t just chilly, but freezing, dropping into the 20s after 7pm — roughly ten degrees colder than our previous coldest Halloween. Unsurprisingly, our trick-or-treater count was also far lower than prior years, at 450–500.
This year’s Halloween weather looks like it’ll be similar to 2017, and to 2013-14: chilly, but not frigid. And Halloween falls on a Saturday this year, like it did the last time we hit 1,200 trick-or-treaters (in 2015). So, in normal times, I would expect a return to at least the 800+ range, if not back to the good old days of 1,000+.
But, of course, there’s nothing normal about these times. We’re in the early stages of the worsening pandemic‘s long-feared fall wave, and winter is coming. Amid a steep upslope toward suffering and death, public-health authorities are urging caution on Halloween.** And we live in a deep-blue neighborhood, in a solid-blue city, in a purplish-blue state… so, most people here take COVID seriously, thank goodness.
Long story short, I assume the coronavirus situation will significantly decrease our trick-or-treater tally. How significantly? I really have no idea. We “only” bought 450 pieces of candy at Costco this year (i.e., three 150-piece bags), down from our usual 1,050 or 1,200. But I honestly have no clue if 450 will prove to be way too many, or way too few, or about right.
I wouldn’t be shocked if, because of the pandemic, we have 250+ candies left at the end of the night. Conversely, I wouldn’t be shocked if, because it’s a Saturday Halloween with decent weather, we run out of candy by 7:15 PM and end up wishing we’d bought twice as much. It could go either way.
Anyway, I’ll be live-streaming, so you can see for yourself how mad the “madness” gets (or not):
I’m sure I’ll also tweet a bunch during trick-or-treat hours, probably using the #CentralParkHalloweenMadness hashtag.
Happy Halloween!
*I used to own the domain StapletonHalloween.com, in fact. (It pointed to this Tumblr post.)
**Personally, while I’m extremely worried about Thanksgiving and Christmas, I think the trick-or-treat freakout is actively counterproductive:
But nobody listens to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ So although we’ll be doing Halloween basically as normal (and mind you, we’re quite COVID-cautious, and are not doing most things as normal), I expect that many/most people won’t.