It hasn’t happened in Newfoundland and Labrador, and probably won’t.
Even so, the topic is significant enough that it was front and centre at a news briefing with provincial health officials on COVID-19 on Wednesday: the second question about the local handling of a global pandemic was about how Halloween treats should be handed out.
Parts of other provinces aren’t so lucky. There’s been a remarkable backlash about the suggestion that trick-or-treating shouldn’t go ahead in areas of the country that are showing a pronounced increase in the number of COVID-19 cases as part of a second wave of the virus. Here, the issue was considered seriously enough that the provincial government put up 670 words’ worth of bullet points on its COVID-19 website, listing all the things that people should do to stop the potential spread of COVID-19 on Halloween. (Such as “Avoid entering indoor porch areas when getting treats.”)
While the spread of the disease in other parts of the country is already bad enough for some physicians to start raising concerns about the prospective impacts of once again shutting down elective surgeries, there are also public arguments that there’s no reason why Halloween shouldn’t go ahead. (The best of which take the line of “Well, X is still open, so why not go ahead with Halloween?”, an argument remarkably similar to “Fred refuses to wear a mask, so why should I wear one?”)
On a typical Halloween, kids get within an arm’s length of any number of neighbours and a significant number of strangers, collecting candy and chips that have been passed out by hand.
But in areas of broader community spread, it’s hard to imagine what is going through people’s heads.
On a typical Halloween, kids get within an arm’s length of any number of neighbours and a significant number of strangers, collecting candy and chips that have been passed out by hand. If you’ve ever been the one to hand out candy, think how close you come to children as they hold their candy sacks open and you lean in to drop their 27th small bag of chips into the sack. It certainly isn’t two metres away — and, if we can’t even seem to successfully pass on the message that masks are also supposed to cover your nose, how are we going to convince everyone they have to make allowances for distanced candy-drops?
If the virus was passed on, you literally couldn’t even start to do effective contact tracing, without sending tracers door to door along individual routes taken by individual families.
Much has been made about handing out candy in a physically distanced way — but what do you do if your kids ring someone’s doorbell, and they are handing out candy the old-fashioned way? Just grab the kids, back up and walk away?
My children are grown, but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand the kind of in-house impact there would be for parents to have to tell their children that this year’s candy-fest was not going to happen — or, perhaps, that it was going to have to happen in a different way, at home, and perhaps among the people children are already in contact with.
But these are unusual times, and those times have their impact on adults and children alike.
It is part of what I think of as a larger issue in the Canadian ethos — the fact that so many of us now believe that sacrifice is something that other people are supposed to do, instead of being a burden that we all have to share.
I honestly believe in the concept that we are part of a community — and sometimes, that community’s needs have to be larger than our own. And sometimes, that hurts.
Yes, a year without Halloween would be a hard sell to children during an already hard time. But if this province was experiencing any sort of community spread, I’d expect public health leaders to take the same steps that are being taken in parts of Ontario where the disease is bursting its earlier bounds — despite the howls of complaint that I’d expect would quickly follow here, too.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire newspapers and websites across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky.
