A trade group that promotes the celebration of Halloween in the US has put together a list of recommendations for celebrating it this year while keeping to Covid-19 social distancing guidelines – including tossing treats to kids.
With celebrations like school graduations being nixed or drastically changed this year in order to abide by Covid-19 safety guidelines across the country, many parents’ eyes are now on Halloween – which is not exactly a holiday friendly to social distancing rules.
The Halloween & Costume Association, a trade group for party supply manufacturers, however, has released recommended guidelines for those who want to participate in the holiday this year.
The group has set up a website where it makes various recommendations for a pandemic-era Halloween based on how “at risk” your local area is, breaking each down into green, yellow, orange, and red zones, based on a coronavirus map powered by the Harvard Global Health Institute.
For the website of recommendations, the group is partnered with organizations like Unicef and companies that rely on Halloween for a large portion of their business, including confectionery company Hershey and costume store Spirit Halloween.
One recommendation for “yellow zones” includes setting up duct tape outside your home to keep children at six feet distance. Then instead of handing the candy to children – surely a no-no in today’s socially distanced world – you can simply throw it, which the site claims is “reminiscent of those nostalgic days gone by where parade floats threw out candy to kids who patiently stood by.”
If you don’t feel like pelting neighborhood kids with candy, you can also set up a “distribution table” to avoid direct contact, or do “Halloween in reverse” if you’re in an “orange zone” where kids don’t even need to leave their front yards. They just sit there and wait for neighbors to drive by and deliver candy straight to them.
Another suggestion is organizing a ‘trunk ‘r treat’, which involves moving the festivities to a parking lot where kids can visit different decorated trunks and get candy.
Unfortunately for “red zones,” the best recommendations are limited invites or Zoom parties, watching Netflix, or setting up scavenger hunts for kids in their own homes so they don’t go out trick or treating at all.
To top everything off, a badge is also being offered this year which people can plaster onto their homes to assure visitors they are abiding by safety regulations. “Proud to support Halloween like we’ve never seen. Make it safe. Keep it fun,” it states.
Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released their own recommendations for Halloween, which they say presents the opportunity for many “high risk” situations, the worst of which is “traditional trick-or-treating where treats are handed to children who go door to door.”
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