Providing a safe house for Halloween
My children are all grown, so I’m not dealing with their Halloween makeup, costumes and accessories anymore. However, I still enjoy greeting children at my front door with their bags held out in eager anticipation of the candy I’ll give them. As a participant in the tradition of “Trick or Treating,” I am very conscious of the children’s safety as they come and go from my front porch.
I think of my own childhood Halloween experiences growing up in Chicago. (That’s the city, not suburbia.) My parents would allow my sister and I to freely wander the neighborhood, up two or three flights of stairs to knock on the doors of the flats (apartments) of people we didn’t even know. We traveled in packs of friends, being loud as we checked our candy booty under the light of a corner street lamp. It seemed everyone became your neighbor on Halloween, even if they lived blocks away.
It’s a different Halloween “world” for kids today. Closely escorted by their parents, they move cautiously through their neighborhoods and subdivisions, usually knocking on the doors of immediate neighbors and friends of the family.
The caution I take as a homeowner is to provide a lighted area of my porch stairs, and rather than open my storm door to distribute candy, I’ve come up with a safer alternative.
Like so many people who have adopted the habit of changing their smoke alarm batteries at the time of the seasonal clock change, I use Halloween as a marker for my storm door change. I remove my screen from the door, which leaves that portion of the door completely unobstructed. It’s from this vantage point I distribute my Halloween candy.
Some children are a bit surprised to see my hand reach out to them while the door is closed; some don’t seem to pay any mind. For me, I feel I’ve just provided a safe environment for kids to receive the payoff of Halloween - a handful of candy. That’s part of what makes the holiday a sweet deal for me!
Posted by Sharon Walker
Providing a safe house for Halloween
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