I came home from an early morning shift to find my daughter feeling down. It seemed she was in a COVID funk.
This would be the first year of Halloween where she could not go trick or treating in our Norman Rockwell community, where we would routinely meet up with a couple of families we love and run into another 30 or 40 friends during an evening's walk through the neighborhood.
The day had been gray and rainy, dissuading her from leaving the house for a walk or bike ride.
I've had more than my share of low moments over the past year, but mine seem an order of magnitude less than a tween in intermediate school.
We sat down for a long talk. Topics covered: What's the hardest part of having us as your parents? The best part? Ditto for your younger brother?
In the end, we looked through old photos and the mood lifted a little.
My wife and I conferred, and it was her brilliant idea (it usually is) to make Halloween great again. We bought a $60 video projector from Amazon, the kind where we simply take our several year old Amazon Firestick and plug it into a USB port, and voila! We can now project a movie onto the wall of our home for an outdoor film experience.
We added a $20 air popper and suddenly popcorn and a movie are opportunities for the kids to bundle up outside, grab chairs seat feet apart from their friends, and watch a spooky surprise.
We're hoping that pizza and ice cream sandwiches on home-baked cookies, followed by popcorn and a big-screen movie, will make Halloween special and leave the door open for subsequent weekend get-togethers with friends.
It would have been better had we thought of this at the start of the summer, but thanks to our mild California winters (I only recently stopped wearing shorts and sandals) we ought to be able to use this party trick for many more weeks to come.