We nixed trick-or-treating because of covid, but the kids will wanted to dress up and to get candy (of course). First, I tried just offering the kids each $20 just to forget the whole holiday, but they balked. Then I considered doing an Easter-egg-hunt-style candy find with flash lights, but they wanted to dress up and be out in costume.

Other families in the neighborhood were wondering what to do as well, so I thought of this idea–a simple parade through the street. Our neighborhood normally does not get trick-or-treaters–in fact, we usually go to another area for it, but I thought it might be fun for the adults without young kids to watch too, and supply some treats if they wanted.

We live in a rural part of the county with a lot of eye-rollers (to put it nicely) when it comes to masks, so since I wrote the rules, I made sure to add that kids and people watching from their driveways should wear a covid mask…not to be confused by a Halloween mask. We’ll see if everyone does. I’ll keep the kids spaced apart as much as it’s possible to keep kids spaced apart, and lead them through the streets.

Hopefully my route isn’t too long, and hopefully it doesn’t rain, and hopefully it doesn’t end up some sort of super-spreader event, and mainly I hope the kids have fun. I also hope that I showed the kids how to be flexible amidst a global pandemic and just because it’s not what you always do, doesn’t mean it’s not going to be fun. Who knows, maybe it will be the first Halloween parade of many!

Download the Flyer

In this zip you will find:

  • Two 8.5×11″ jpgs: one has the orange banner version and one has a printer-friendly white banner version.
  • A Word doc with those jpgs set as the background, with a text box on top, so you can customize. The flyer “background” will look faded because it’s set in the header, to be behind text, and to be the size of the page.