We Built A Candy Chute For Trick-Or-Treating This Year
We really hoped that it wouldn't happen, but COVID-19 will be impacting our Halloween season.
Even though the pandemic will make celebrating Halloween this year a lot different, it won't take it from us completely. There will still be chances to dress up, trick or treat, watch spooky movies, go to a Farmer's Market, and eat too much candy.
For my family, Halloween has always been a big deal. My wife and I have gone over-the-top with our decorations for years. Its pretty normal to find a Halloween tree (think Christmas tree, but black and decorated in Halloween items and lights) in our house during this time of year. Actually, a few years ago, my wife put up multiple Halloween trees throughout the house.
We decorate the yard, building a little graveyard with foam tombstones and inflatable characters, and put lights up around the house.
Oh, and we're the house that gives out full size candy bars too.
But this year, things will be different. Not as far as the decorations go (they're already up), or the full size candy bars go (the stockpile is already being built), but trick-or-treating will be different for sure.
Now I understand that we've been getting bags of food handed out drive thru windows into our cars for months, and if that's safe, then so is traditional trick-or-treating. But not everyone is comfortable with the idea of regular trick-or-treating this year. So we wanted to do something that would make those who were uncomfortable about this Halloween season, fell a little more comfortable.
We decided to build a "candy chute".
The basic idea is that we'll be able to deliver candy to trick-or-treaters from more than ten feet away. Socially distanced trick-or-treating...and it's actually pretty fun too. Just sending candy down the chute is kind fun, even if in a very basic way.
Now our candy chute is very simple, it's ten feet of PVC pipe. Our pipe is 4 inch diameter, because we're doing full size candy, if you are doing regular Halloween candy, you can get away with smaller. But honestly, even the ten feet at 4 inch diameter cost about $10. We then got some spray paint to color it, and shiny duct tape to decorate it. We're using our ladder and step ladder to help create the slope, you could use whatever objects or materials you had on hand.
But ours is VERY basic, but we did it for about $25 total, and that's because we splurged on fluorescent spray paint. You could really knock this out for $15 bucks if you really wanted to.
Now if you wanted to get MORE creative, there are a lot of concepts for that already too.
Check out some of these in-depth designs from around the internet:
If you wanted to get a little crazier, you could make a "Candy Zip Line (Featuring Adult Beverages)"...