COVID was the worst, but it also gave us the Halloween candy chute | Theodore Decker
Halloween #Halloween
I was putting the finishing touches on my Halloween display when a neighbor from up the street posed a question that I already had been asking myself, one that even at this late date I still do not have an answer to.
“You breaking out the chute again this year?”
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I am fortunate, I concede, to lead the largely comfortable life that allows me to contemplate such goofy questions for entirely too long.
But I can turn almost anything into an existential dilemma. Just ask my psychologist.
Case in point: the Halloween candy conveyance conundrum.
You have to understand, I’m bonkers for Halloween. For the past few years, once my own kids passed trick-or-treating age, I have sworn to downsize the Halloween decorations. Yet every year they increase.
Since there isn’t much wiggle room in the family budget for store-bought, 12-foot-tall skeletons, many of my decorations are coddled together in a DIY fashion.
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Faceless monster Slender Man is a plastic foam mannequin head, dressed in a black suit from the thrift store and white latex cleaning gloves. I built Sam, the creepy little protagonist of homegrown director Michael Dougherty’s fantastic horror film, “Trick ‘r Treat,” from a child’s Halloween onesie, a piece of burlap, some buttons, and one of the kids’ inflatable kickballs.
This year’s addition is the Babadook, the Australian-born boogeyman who will stand in an upstairs window, illuminated by strobe lights and looking dapper in a cheap top hat and my dad’s 1950s wool overcoat.
Hauling all this junk out every year, admittedly, can be tiresome. So can my grumbling in the weeks leading up to Halloween, as I watch the fall winds methodically and repeatedly dismantle the corn shocks that I have carefully staked throughout the front yard.
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The candy chute also was DIY, born out of necessity in 2020.
COVID was ruining everything, but I swore that if trick-or-treating wasn’t canceled, I would find a way to deliver candy without the usual bottleneck of kids at the front door. Back then, the idea of several hundred small hands grabbing for goodies from a common cauldron was about as frightening as they come.
A long section of 3-inch PVC pipe, some orange spray paint and black electrical tape was all it took. I grabbed handfuls of candy and shot them through the pipe, from my front porch perch to the treaters in the yard.
And they ate it up.
Part of their joy came in the anticipation. They could hear the candy’s journey down the tube, followed by the satisfying thwack as it landed in their bags and plastic pumpkins.
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I missed the traditional ringing of the doorbell, but I don’t think the kids did.
I figured the chute was a one-off, but when COVID dragged into 2021, I dragged it out again. Might as well use it.
This year, with COVID lingering but vaccination fairly widespread, it seemed as though I could skip the tube and revert to Halloween horror business as usual.
My neighbor, though, urged me to bring back the chute. Not for health and safety reasons, he said, but for the sheer fun of it.
The kids love the chute for the obvious reasons. It’s a weird, Seuss-like contraption, and almost magical in the Wonka way it delivers the goods.
My fondness for it, predictably, is more existential.
COVID upended everything: how we work, learn, socialize and celebrate. Kids fell behind in their studies. Parents lost jobs. Too many died.
That whole miserable stretch of years felt like we were stuck in a long and dark downhill slide. If even the smallest treat came out of all that and is waiting for us at the end, well, then I guess we should cherish it.
Theodore Decker is the Dispatch metro columnist.
tdecker@dispatch.com
@Theodore_Decker
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: COVID was the worst, but it also gave us the Halloween candy chute | Theodore Decker