For many, 2020 will be the first year that Halloween is officially canceled. However, one Halloween-loving family in Ohio came up with the perfect way to maintain a safe distance from trick-or-treaters without sacrificing the Halloween spirit: a candy chute.
Andrew Beattie loves Halloween. "[Halloween] is just something I've always been passionate about," he said. Even before the pandemic, Beattie was considering the idea of a candy chute to make Halloween more accessible to those with mobility issues.
Beattie, who suffers from an autoimmune disease himself, thought that an extra few feet of space would be good "at the time of year when people are having colds and things."
Beattie and his six-year-old daughter constructed the chute from six feet of shipping tube. They spray-painted the final product orange, layered it with a spiral of black duct tape, and then adhered it to the railing that runs down the porch toward the street.
"This is something that the kids will enjoy and not think of it as, 'I'm doing this to prevent disease,'" Beattie said. "They're doing it to have a good time… We need that. We need the community spirit back right now."
After only three days of the chute being posted to Facebook, the contraption went viral.
"Even if people are completely comfortable with how things are, there are a lot of people who aren't," he continued. "If they can see people doing things like this, it can give them a little bit of grace, and that it might encourage more people to get involved and get out there and get us back to looking the way we want to look."