Halloween’s a-Happening: Safety in Townhome Communities
Generally speaking, townhome-style condo communities are bustling hubs of activity full of people coming and going, residents enjoying the amenities, and folks getting together just for the heck of it. Once a year, though, something downright spooky seems to take place. At the end of every October, on the evening of the 31st, everyone simply seems to, well, vanish! It’s sort of eerie. Once-active condo communities become quiet as crypts. Nothing can be heard except the rustling of the fallen leaves and the branches of trees scraping against windows. It’s almost as if, for that one night, everyone becomes…a ghost! AAAAAAHHHH!
Okay, maybe our Creepy Condo Ghost Story needs a bit of work, but our point stands: townhome communities, particularly condo-type community setups, for whatever reason, tend to turn into absolute ghost towns on Halloween – but we’re out to help you change that. Read on to learn more about Halloween safety in Edmonton and discover what you can do to give your condo community a jolt and bring it shambling back to life this October 31st – if you dare!
Townhome Trick-or-Treating: The BEST Kind of Trick-or-Treating???
To kick things off, we wanted to be sure to drive home a point that it seems like many trick-or-treaters aren’t aware of: townhome trick-or-treating is AWESOME. Now, to be fair, we know that kids aged 6-12 probably don’t make up the very largest segment of our blog readership, but we’ll count on the parents out there to pass this info on for us.
It all comes down to numbers and logistics. Townhomes are closer together than houses, which means more trick-or-treating opportunities for every square foot. This narrows down the candy-to-steps-taken ratio and leads to a more favourable treat-vs-trick outcome. Factor in the well-known Newtonian Principle of Chocolate Bar Dynamics, and – well, we won’t bore you with the math. The important bit is that at the end of the day, it means MORE CANDY.
In addition, just for all you parents out there (sorry, 6-to-12-year-old demographic, bear with us), townhomes also offer an additional element of safety when it comes to trick-or-treating. Generally, these spacestend to host somewhat tighter-knit communities than your typical lane of detached homes, while also often being more well-lit and insulated to boot.
So, we know townhomes are great for trick-or-treating – but what do you do to go about getting the neighbourhood kids to stop by? We have some suggestions.
Have a Happening Halloween
Whether or not your townhome community has been lively in years past,these ideas, will give you a good shot at raising the trick o’ treating fun from the undead:
- Placemaking. This is basically a fancy term for carving out space in your condo community for a purpose or event. In the context of trick-or-treating, placemaking can be helpful in encouraging community member participation and activity. Setting aside space for things like a group pumpkin-carving event in the days leading up to Halloween can help set the tone and get people excited. Just be sure to take your condo’s layout and location into account – pumpkin carving can be fun, but pumpkin carving outdoors in the cold sure wouldn’t be!
- Get festive. Encouraging residents to take part in the holiday with decorations, lights, and jack-o-lanterns can do signal to the neighbourhood kids that your condo community isn’t just a bunch of no-fun Scrooges (or whatever the Halloween equivalent of a Scrooge is?). However, be sure to temper this enthusiasm with a quick double-check of the condo community by-laws. Depending on your townhome’s legislation, certain sorts of eerie embellishments –things like lights, noises, fog machines, and more – may not be permitted. There may be rules about hanging things on doorways and balconies as well, so be sure to be informed before you start decorating to avoid a scaaaaaary visit from the condo board! 👻
- Keep things safe. Parents have enough to fret about on Halloween, so if your townhome community looks like a safe place for kids to visit, you can bet the adults out there will steer their little ghosts and goblins towards it. When it comes to Halloween safety tips, the biggest things to consider are ensuring public spaces are well-lit, keeping the paths shoveled clean of snow and ice (this is Alberta, after all!), and encouraging kids to trick-or-treat together in a group (ideally with a chaperon) and never on their own.
Follow these steps, and you’ll have more kids trick-or-treating in your townhome condo community than you can shake a zombie’s arm at (and ew, put that zombie arm down, that’s gross). It might take a Halloween or two’s worth of work – depending on how dead things normally get on Halloween in your complex, it may take a while for the word to get out that there’s tip-top trick-or-treating there – but if you put the time in, it’s bound to pay off.
Want to learn more about making your townhome a scary-fun place to be this October 31st? Have some Halloween community-building advice that worked for your complex? We’d love to chat – give usa shout, shriek, or ghostly wail at Catalyst Condo Management Ltd to talk about condo living in Edmonton today!