Pre-Pandemic vs Post Pandemic: How has Halloween Culture Changed?

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Picture this. It’s before the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s October 31st at 5 pm, and the sky is already getting dark. The trees are changing the color of their leaves from green to shades of orange, red and yellow. The houses all around have skeletons, ghosts, and other spooky Halloween decorations up, and the streets are full of kids in costume walking up to doors with their parents waiting on the side walk, making it something that brings friends and families together.

Now flash forward to today, in a post pandemic world. We still have the sun going down at the same time, the leaves still change their colors, but the streets are quiet, almost as if the tradition of trick-or-treating has disappeared. It’s been replaced, but by what? What has replaced something that has been a part of Halloween, not only in our lives, but in media as well?

It seems like after the pandemic, we have all gotten used to the lack of human contact that we once found normal in our every day lives. Everyone seems to be more risk averse, which means that we don’t open our doors to strangers anymore, even kids dressed in costumes. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Mario costume, or a kid in a simple ghost costume, we have conditioned ourselves to do the opposite of what we did for so many decades before.

In place of what we saw as traditional trick-or-treating, we don’t have just one replacement that has appeared, but we have multiple instead. One of the replacements that we have is something called “trunk-or-treat”. Instead of having kids go from house to house, instead they now sit in a parking lot, and go from car trunk to car trunk. While it is similar to the original feeling of trick-or-treating, it isn’t the same. There’s little to no decorations, there’s no wonder of seeing the door open to see what kind of candy you’ll get, it’s just different.

The other activity that has replaced the traditional trick-or-treating is not something in a parking lot, nor is it going from door to door. Instead it in a mall. A shopping mall, where we go to find food courts and dipping dots. Where retail workers dread the arrival of Christmas because the music just is an endless loop. During Halloween, all the stores have candy that they’ll give to kids that come in costume. While this does bring back the same kid of feeling as going door to door, and home to home, it feels like a corporate cash in instead of something that can be done with families and wholesome fun.

Does this mean that trick-or-treating as we knew it is dead and gone? Honestly, more than likely it is. After the pandemic, it is hard for us to go back to the way we used to be. What we have now is likely to be the new normal, and what we knew before, and what we see in movies will be something we’ll have to explain to future generations instead of them experiencing it for themselves.