You'll Never Guess What People Are Trying To Replace Trick-Or-Treating With
Halloween is one holiday that lends itself well to mashups, as in that classic multi-holiday movie The Nightmare Before Christmas. A Halloween/Easter crossover, though, is something new. So what does this look like? Chocolate bunny skulls? Candy corn? Jelly beans? Walpurgisnacht? (The German Girl in America blog explains that this is a kind of Halloween-in-April celebrated in Germany).
No, not yet, and not in this country. In fact, we won't even see any pumpkin Peeps this year. What we may see, at least in the St. Louis area, is something new and un-eggspected: would you believe, Halloween egg hunts? According to St. Louis' Patch, this is what's being put out there by some concerned parents as a socially-distanced alternative to trick-or-treating in a year when we all fear disease far more than ghoulies, ghosties, and anything else that may go bump in the night. Egg hunts allow for a no-contact method of candy transmission...Plus, as an added bonus, if this really takes off, it could help to revive the hard-hit plastic egg-making industry (since Easter 2020 was kind of a non-starter due to quarantine).
How Halloween egg hunts are supposed to work
According to Patch, one St. Louis woman was afraid COVID-19 precautions might wind up canceling Halloween. She thought if households left candy-filled eggs on their lawns, kids could just pick these up and go without having to ring the doorbell or stand shoulder-to-shoulder with other candy collectors. She even dreamed up a story about a poltergeist swiping the Easter Bunny's eggs in order to explain to kids why Halloween would look a little different this year.
As it turned out, her idea just happened to coincide with one formulated by a company called American Carnival Mart. They were stuck with a surplus of unsold plastic eggs from last Easter, so they thought, hey, why not unload these for another holiday? Fourth of July eggs probably weren't going to fly, but Halloween's all about sugar with a side of cheap plastic novelties. Throw in a few pandemic precautions, and you get the Halloween egg hunt kit complete with a sign saying "Find 2 eggs. If you touch it, take it. Happy Hunting!"
Whether or not these eggs are ever going to fly remains to be seen, since there's a chance they'll be snatched up by the first random passerby (animal or human) to come along. What's more, if they have chocolate in them, they are a danger to any dog with the jaw strength to bite through a flimsy plastic shell, so hopefully, egg hunt hosts will bear this in mind.