Tonight’s the night, but I have no basis on which to predict how many trick-or-treaters will be ringing our doorbell tonight. That’s because this is our first Halloween in our new neighborhood. For the previous decade we lived in the city and we never had trick-or-treaters come to our house. Not one in ten years.

That didn’t stop us last year from buying three bags of fun-sized candy bars because, you know, just in case. We ended up, yet again, with zero trick-or-treaters and with three full bags of fun-sized candy bars that we slowly consumed during the whole month of November.

Now we live in the burbs and there are a lot kids, from toddlers to teens, who live in our neighborhood. So if times were normal, we’d expect a deluge of trick-or-treaters at our door tonight.

But these aren’t normal times. We’re experiencing a pandemic that has killed more than 225,000 Americans with more than nine million having contracted the virus. I know that if we still had young children in our home, we would not permit them to go house to house begging for candy.

But I don’t know what other parents in our neighborhood are going to do this year about letting their kids go trick-or-treating. Thus, I have no idea what to expect tonight. Will we get a large showing of kids at our door or will we get none?

Too much or not enough?

My wife doesn’t want to take any chances of coming up short when it comes to candy this year, so we bought eight bags of fun-sized candy bars. My guess, though, is that’s probably seven bags too many, which will mean that we’ll have enough leftover fun-sized candy bars to slowly consume at least through January.

We’re in a new neighborhood and in a new world where social distancing and wearing face masks is the new normal. So who knows? I guess we’ll find out by later tonight.

Happy Halloween everyone!

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Written for Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, where the word is “trick.”