A Pandemic Halloween 2020

We celebrated Halloween this year the best way we knew how. We put up our decorations and I baked sugar cookies, cupcakes, and made a giant hearty vegetarian lasagna and heated spiced apple cider. My 11 year old made vegan rice krispie treats too and we bought bags and bags of our favorite Halloween candy. We kind of went all out with the sugar treats.

Baked small apples with carved faces

Spiced apple cider with lemon juice & water

There is still no in person school and with that no school party. We weren't even sure if we could go trick or treating or if anyone would give out candy. For my 5 year old's sake, we had her dressed up a few times leading up to Halloween and then we went for a Halloween walk. I had planned for us to stay home, have a nice dinner and party and may be watch a Halloween movie together. We decided to go out at the last minute when it turned out that the weather would be spectacular and that there was going to be a blue moon out. Plus, it was a Saturday night and all the stars just seemed to be aligned for us to go out for Halloween. I told the kids we would only go out for 30-45 minutes and we would not be knocking on any doors because of coronavirus and if there were people around, we would wait until they cleared out before we approached houses. Now if during our Halloween walk, we saw candy placed out, the plan was to have my 11 year old take some candy for both of them using a food safe glove.

I am so glad we got to go out for a bit! There definitely weren't many homes celebrating Halloween but when they did give out candy, many were individually bagged and contained several pieces of candy. There might have been candy placed outside a home for every 4-5 homes. Not many but we still managed to collect quite a few in a short time. My 5 year old was so excited for Halloween! My almost 12 year was not and went out in regular clothes. My 5 year old was the only one in costume and the rest of us wore face masks. We saw maybe 3 kids out. It was so quiet in our neighborhood. It has been just a bummer for the kids since March with school closed and virtual learning taking over our lives so I'm so happy we were able to do this for them. Once we started collecting more candy, my 11 year old actually got excited and started running from house to house. He said how awesome it was because you don't even have to knock on doors, wait, and talk to anyone. Getting candy was so much faster this way! In fact, he hopes that next Halloween would be another pandemic Halloween. Geez. When we got home, all the candy went into quarantine for three days. No big deal since we had all of our homemade treats.

My 5 year old helped with decorating the cookies and cupcakes. It was a craft I wanted to do with her to celebrate Halloween week. My 11 year old was not really interested. I'm glad I was able to do that with her. She definitely has my love for crafts and art. My son is more like his dad I guess. He did carve a pumpkin but I feel like we had to pressure him to do it. I carved a pumpkin too with a design for my daughter. She is really into Avatar: The Last Airbender so I carved Avatar Aang in the Avatar state. When I told her I would carve Aang, she described what she wanted and it ended up being the exact image I had printed out days ago. It's a little creepy how much we think alike! Lol.

Candy out of quarantine

We had a great pandemic Halloween, just the four of us. I honestly don't know what I would do without my little family over here. I would feel super isolated and lonely.