Satire, Pandemic, Rituals
The Awkwardness of Halloween 2020
Celebrating death during a pandemic
My neighbor has a skull on her lawn. A plastic skull. And a skeletal forearm.
Another neighbor has a plastic graveyard on the lawn, complete with witches on a broom and gigantic black spiders.
And here I am, locked up in my home just like my neighbors, trying to stay alive during the COVID pandemic.
In our houses, there is no celebration of death.
Outside, we dish out the works. Bones, vampires, coffins, ghouls, ghosts, spider webs, every plastic artifice money can buy.
And for whom?
For our children, of course. Our little precious babies. For their fun and entertainment.
As I write these lines, I feel weird that there have been over 50,000 new COVID cases in the country four days in a row. Real death is out there, dancing on real graves. And here we are getting ready to celebrate as a nation, not life but our annual fake-death play.
It should be fun, right? Halloween, I mean.
But perhaps not this year.
Perhaps this year, it’s a bit too much to dress our little ones as mummies smeared in fake blood and send…
