Scary Stories in a Pandemic Year

Here we are, at the second Halloween in a year of pandemic.  Of course, you might not know anything is out of the ordinary, depending on where you live.  I am not seeing nearly as many masks as I once did, but my county has a vaccination rate of 82% and a low positivity rate of 3%, according the county school board which will stop requiring high school students to wear masks on Monday, All Saints Day.

I wish I trusted their numbers.  I have this vision of an animation of this disease laughing and saying, "Sure, it's a low positivity rate now.  Take those masks off and see what happens."

I am still keeping my mask on in stores and trying to remember to wash my hands whenever I return from someplace outside my home or office.  And I try to go to stores early in the morning, when there are less people there.  Of course, I did that before the pandemic too.

Yesterday I went to the grocery store early.  We live in a new place this year, so I wanted to get some Halloween candy, just in case.  I'm glad I did.  Yesterday at 3, there was a knock on the door--trick or treaters!  I gave them candy.  I wondered if I missed the memo about trick or treating in the building.  I went down to check the mail, just in case a notice was put in our boxes.  Nope.  I admired the ambition of the children and waited for more to follow their lead, but so far, they are our only trick or treaters.

I am trying not to think about past Halloweens, when we would have had different plans.  Today we will go to church, where I will do something different with the altar, because it is Reformation Sunday.  At Trader Joe's on Friday, I bought some mums, which we can use both today and next week, for All Saints.  

And then we'll see if we get more trick or treaters, if they get to us before we finish up all the candy.  I will bake a chocolate cake for work tomorrow, where we'll be celebrating a colleague's birthday.  We won't be carving pumpkins or doing anything seasonal.  We watched It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown last week, so we may not even have much in the way of seasonal viewing; I don't want to fill my brain with the typical Halloween movie fare. 

So, it will be a low-key Halloween, more like a typical Sunday that a holiday.  But that will be O.K. too.