The October 2020 issue of Connections featured stories of “Homebound Holidays” from Issaquah Highlands residents who shared how they planned to celebrate various fall holidays while facing the challenges and restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic. This year, we asked the same residents for an update on their holiday traditions and plans.
In October 2020, resident Chelsea Musick wrote about how she predicted the pandemic would affect her family’s Halloween celebration that year. This month, Chelsea reflects on last year’s Halloween and provides an update below:
Last year, my family had to put our imaginations to the test. We altered many traditional family celebrations because of the COVID-19 pandemic, none more so than Halloween. Normally, October is full of costume creation, shopping, Halloween parties, ending with a fun evening of trick-or-treating along with friends and neighbors. My family knew we wouldn’t be able to celebrate Halloween as we had in the past, so we sat down and came up with creative ideas to make the most of our 2020 celebration.
We bought additional decorations and pumpkins for our yard and spent time making the outside of our house as spooky as we could. We baked chocolate-frosted bat cookies and pumpkin muffins. We bought some dry ice and spent the afternoon pretending we were making potions. We had multiple family movie nights where we watched some great classic Halloween movies like “The Addams Family” and “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” On Halloween night, we watched the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie (there are ghosts in it, so it fit our spooky theme), ate pizza, and all the candy we wanted. My daughter had the idea to go trick-or-treating in our house: she dressed in a costume and knocked on each door. I had a lot of fun pretending to be different people when she came trick-or-treating at my door.
While 2020 was a challenging year, we did make some pleasant Halloween memories and maybe some new traditions. After using up a lot of my creativity last year making Halloween special for my kids, I am looking forward to celebrating Halloween traditionally again this year and taking them trick-or-treating.
Chelsea Musick is an Issaquah Highlands resident and a member of the Issaquah Highlands Community Fund Board of Directors.
Click here to read all stories in the “Homebound Holidays” series >>
