Trick-or-treating in a pandemic? Columbia-area residents debate how to do Halloween
With great dismay, there will be no 9-foot inflated sandworm and 8-foot electric Beetlejuice sign in Eva Foussat’s front yard this Halloween. The sign took a month to build last October, but it’ll stay in storage this year.
As many as 2,400 children have visited Foussat’s house in Columbia’s historic Elmwood Park neighborhood on past Halloween nights. But she just can’t see inviting that kind of crowd to gather near her home this year, as the highly contagious and often dangerous coronavirus continues to spread through the Midlands.
“This is my favorite time of year, and I am so sad that it’s probably not going to happen, at least at our house,” Foussat said. “I just can’t figure out a responsible way to do it.”
Halloween in the age of coronavirus has presented a quandary for Columbia-area neighborhoods, as residents and local officials debate the safety of traditional Halloween activities, including trick-or-treating.
While Columbia city officials are not taking an official stance on whether residents should go trick-or-treating in their neighborhoods, the city has canceled all of its traditional Halloween community events in the interest of safety.
“We want to be safe during this pandemic, and I think the safest way to (celebrate) Halloween this year would be on a smaller scale and family-oriented activities,” said Randy Davis, the city’s parks and recreation director.
The city has called off its Spooktacular Halloween Party at Dutch Square Mall and won’t host any events at city parks. Instead, Davis said families should consider creative ways to celebrate the holiday among themselves, such as doing crafts or having outdoor activities. Halloween, he said, “lends itself to creativity without canceling it altogether.”
To trick-or-treat, or...?
In Irmo, residents are free to trick-or-treat, but Mayor Barry Walker has urged them not to.
Walker, having recently recovered from COVID-19 himself, acknowledged the community needs an injection of fun amid a difficult year — but going door-to-door Halloween night is not the safest idea, he said.
“We are not passing a law or ordinance to stop you from doing it, but as a recovering COVID patient, I can tell you the coronavirus is no joke,” Walker said. “And if we can do something to mitigate (your chance of) getting that, I suggest you do that.”
As a trick-or-treat alternative, the town is hosting a free drive-in showing of “Night at the Museum” at the Anchor Lanes bowling alley on Halloween evening, with individually wrapped bags of candy along with other snacks — and costumes, of course, are encouraged.
Across the country and in South Carolina, some communities have taken official action to ban trick-or-treating this year, including the small town of Hampton near the southern tip of the state, which voted last week to disallow trick-or-treating but will not issue any tickets or fines, The Island Packet reported.
In the Columbia area, individuals and neighborhoods are navigating the trick-or-treat debate more casually among themselves.
Some are finding creative ways to still welcome candy-seekers, with the belief that in this extended difficult season, everyone, and kids especially, could use a bit of a treat.
“Some people say maybe we just need to ex Halloween out altogether, but I don’t want to do that,” said Lanier Lebby-Alston, a Waverly resident who plans to clip pieces of candy to clothesline strung in her yard on Halloween as a way “to stay safe but still have some of that fairy tale, that mysticism that comes with being a child.”
“Halloween was magical” for her as a child, she said. And now she experiences that magic and joy through the eyes of the costumed children who visit her home, many of whom are her students at Hand Middle School.
A home economics teacher, Lebby-Alston has seen up close the toll the ongoing pandemic has taken on children in the community.
“COVID has really taken away some of the innocence of being a child,” she said. “With those special holidays like Halloween and Christmas or what have you, we want to kind of go that extra mile to ensure they have somewhat of a norm in the abnormal.”
In Elmwood Park, one of Columbia’s most popular trick-or-treating destinations, Halloween is the queen of holidays. Streets are traditionally closed to vehicle traffic for hours to make way for the thousands of ghouls, princesses, superheroes and superstars who converge from all across the city.
Elmwood Park neighborhood leaders and residents are still debating whether to close off streets in the neighborhood this year. But some residents, like Foussat, are deciding on their own to deter trick-or-treaters by foregoing their traditional elaborate home decorations.
“We’ve talked to a couple of our neighbors, and some have said, ‘No, I really want to give children a chance for normalcy.’ That is laudable. That is understandable,” said Cathy Brookshire, whose fortune-telling booth at her house on Lincoln Street has become one of the neighborhood’s main attractions in recent years.
But it won’t be this year.
She and her husband are both in their 60s, which puts them at higher risk for complications should they contract COVID-19. With sadness, they won’t take that risk with trick-or-treaters. Their house will stay dark this year.
“We thought about this really, really hard,” Brookshire said. “I just finally thought, you know, it’s one Halloween.”
