Tonight is the one night of the year when every instinct you’ve spent your adult life building is wrong, and it’s supposed to be.
Strangers walking up your driveway after dark. Groups of them. Faces covered. Knocking on your door, over and over, from about six until the little ones fade out around eight-thirty. Any other night in October that sequence would have you up off the couch.
Tonight it’s a kid dressed as a dinosaur and his dad standing at the end of the walk looking at his phone.
So this isn’t a tactical problem and I’m not going to pretend it is. Nobody needs a plan for Halloween. What’s actually worth ten minutes this afternoon is setting the evening up so you’re not making any decisions in a doorway at seven-fifteen with a bowl of candy in one hand.
The single best move is the one that has nothing to do with guns at all. Don’t answer the door tonight. Go sit outside.
Chair in the driveway, or the garage door up and a couple of chairs in it, or a firepit if you’ve got one and the wind’s cooperating. Candy bowl on a table at the end of the walk. That one change does more than anything else on this list — the door never opens, you see everybody coming from thirty feet out in good light, the parents get to say hello instead of standing in the dark, and the kids don’t have to work up the nerve to knock. Everybody has a better night. Half the street will end up in your driveway by eight.
Light the walk while you’re at it. Not floods in people’s eyes — just enough that you’re looking at faces instead of shapes, and that the eight-year-old in a cape doesn’t put a foot off the edge of your step. Most porches are one bulb short of this already.
Then the one actual decision, and the right time to make it is now, not later.
Decide where the gun is going to be tonight before the first knock, and be honest with yourself about what the evening actually looks like. If there’s going to be a beer at the firepit with the neighbors — and on a Saturday Halloween there’s going to be a beer at the firepit with the neighbors — then it’s locked up and that’s the end of it. That’s not a hard call. It’s only a hard call if you leave it until the moment you’re already three in and somebody offers you a fourth.
And if you’re carrying, it’s covered. Properly. Not a t-shirt riding up over it while you’re bent over handing a Snickers to a toddler, with a dozen parents standing in your driveway holding phones. There’s no version of that conversation that goes well for you, and it’s the kind of thing that ends up on a neighborhood page with your address in it.
The dog gets a room with the door shut. You know this already and every year somebody forgets. Your front door is going to open more times tonight than it does in a normal month, and a dog who’s perfectly steady for one visitor is a different animal at the fortieth, with the doorbell going and strangers in masks on the step.
Last thing is about ten o’clock, and it’s the part worth remembering.
At some point the kids are done. The porch light goes off, the bowl comes in, and the night goes back to being a normal night. If somebody knocks at ten-thirty, that’s not a trick-or-treater. The ordinary rules apply again — you don’t have to open the door, you can talk through it, and a grown man on your porch at that hour after your light is off has made a choice you didn’t make for him.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
Sit outside, light the walk, put the dog up, make the gun decision at four instead of nine, and go hand out candy.
It’s a good night. It’s one of the few left where everybody on the street actually comes outside and talks to each other.
