The Halloween That Refused to Be Cancelled: COVID, kindergarten, a newborn, and one last neighborhood haunt

Halloween 2020 was a weird one for obvious reasons. COVID was in full swing, I was very pregnant and due in the middle of October, and I had already decided that Halloween decorating was absolutely not happening that year. I had more than enough going on. Trent was supposed to start kindergarten, but because I was about to have a baby, I homeschooled him until two weeks after I gave birth. His school was doing an incredible job keeping the kids outside for most of the day, but I was worried that I could pick something up at the hospital during delivery and send him back to school carrying it before we even knew. So kindergarten happened at our kitchen table while I was approximately 900 months pregnant.

Then, on October 1st, Trent asked me if we were still decorating for Halloween.

I looked at that adorable little face and those ridiculous bright blue eyes and realized this child apparently did not care that his mother was about to produce an entire human being. Halloween was expected. To make matters worse, people in the neighborhood had started asking if we were decorating too. Everyone knew we were moving the following spring, so there was definitely a little pressure for one last Halloween at the house.

I told Aaron absolutely not. I was not decorating a giant yard nine months pregnant. His response was that he would do it, and I would only have to tell him where everything went. This was notable because it was the first year Aaron had ever actually decorated for Halloween. In previous years, neighbors would constantly tell him what an amazing job he had done while he was outside fixing one errant wire or picking up a piece of trash. Meanwhile, I had spent a month building an entire haunted world around him. Apparently standing near decorations while holding an extension cord is enough to establish creative direction.

So that year, I sat, pointed, directed, changed my mind, pointed some more, and Aaron hauled skeletons, stretched webs, moved lights, set up fog, arranged the cemetery, and learned exactly how many times I am willing to say, “No, a little farther to the left.”

And somehow, in the middle of COVID, homeschooling kindergarten, preparing to move, and having a baby in mid-October, Halloween still happened.

Looking at these pictures now, I’m glad it did. It was chaotic, completely unreasonable, and exactly the kind of normal our little boy needed that year. And I have to give Aaron credit: after years of accidentally receiving compliments for my Halloween displays, in 2020 he finally earned some of them.

Of course, I was still the creative director. Some things are sacred.