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Collected Item: “Halloween At Home”

Give your story a title.

Halloween At Home

What sort of object is this: text story, photograph, video, audio interview, screenshot, drawing, meme, etc.?

Photograph, video

Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.

Halloween is usually a month long celebration at our house. We plan our costumes months in advance. We go to Disneyland at least a dozen times to enjoy the special Halloween treats, decorations, and to wear the insane amount of Disney Halloween shirts we own. On Halloween night, we serve at our church running game booths for the community and come home just in time to trick or treat (and usually get A LOT of candy because we’re some of the last trick or treaters). This year, of course, every single thing listed above was cancelled. With so many disappointments this year, we committed to making Halloween a celebration from morning until night. Making our own backyard carnival, the kids bobbed for apples, carved pumpkins and played Halloween soccer (okay, it was just soccer but we were in costumes!) My daughter was over the moon to have us all dress as Hogwarts students, except for her little brother who dressed as her owl. Lunch included ghost shaped chips, jack-o-lantern quesadillas, grape “eye balls,” and guacamole in a jack-o-lantern pepper. To make dinner extra special, we brought out the fondue set we registered for when we got married over 15 years ago and never opened. The kids loved a dinner of dipping into cheese and chocolate. The one thing my son repeated all of October was he wanted to “trick or treat to all the doors in the house.” Undaunted, we turned off most of the lights, put a bowl of candy inside every door in the house, and put either an adult or a dressed up stuffed animal (there’s only three adults here and way more doors) at each door. The kids were genuinely excited to trick or treat and actually knocked at every single door, and gleefully filled their bags with candy. It’s easy to focus on all that has been lost this year, but this simple, stress free, at home Halloween may have ended up their favorite one ever.

Use one-word hashtags (separated by commas) to describe your story. For example: Where did it originate? How does this object make you feel? How does this object relate to the pandemic?

pandemic prompt, HST 580, Arizona State University, holidays, Halloween

Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)

Kathryn Jue

Give this story a date.

2020-10-31
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