Halloween Candy Wheel Redux

Last year for Halloween we put out a spin wheel and kids had to spin the wheel to see what they would win (candy wise). Throughout last year's blog we recorded a few things that could have been better:

• Needed better outdoor lighting
• Spins were taking too long (20-30 seconds)
• The wheel needed to be anchored better
• We ran out of candy

So naturally this year we bought a lot more candy including candy that probably had to be classified a larger size than king size candy. We were brainstorming the selection going from box -> mega -> king -> regular in terms of size of the candy selection. A boxed candy for example was like what you might buy at a movie theater and full of individual items. We only had about 12 of those box candies so it was going to be a rare roll on the spin wheel.

The wheel spinning too long was a bit difficult to change, so we resulted in just taping the flapper with layers of tape. The only tape we quickly had available that was wide enough was blue painters tape. As we added more layers it was a bit more rigid so as it rotated it stopped quicker than it would have prior.

Finally, we added some bricks to anchor it down better and positioned outdoor Hue lights alongside flood lights to light up the area as it got darker.

So as October 31 arrived we started the morning off making some jello shots for any of the parents supervising the trick or treaters. This time we made berry blue & strawberry for the flavors - each batch was 1 cup of boiling water, cold water and vodka. We made a bit more this year as we only had 5 shots remaining after last years festivities.

As the night approached (6:45pm sunset) we only had probably 10 kids prior to sunset. This is in stark comparison to last year when I was arriving home from work at around 5pm and saw people walking around everywhere. I wonder if Halloween on a weekend is different than Halloween on a weeknight in terms of timing & people.

One kid in that set landed on the space "one of anything" and just wanted a little rubber duck which I thought was pretty funny. It reminded me of last year when we had glow up bugs and people kept picking those.

Unfortunately for this year all of our weather apps said it was going to rain and sure enough it did multiple times throughout the night. I pulled the stats from my weather station in the background and we had:

• 7:10 to 7:25 - light drizzle.
• 7:55 to 8:05 - downpour of rain.
• 8:05 to 8:20 - light drizzle.
• 9:45 to 10:35 - steady rain.
• 11:15 to 11:20 - light drizzle.

Of course we packed up the stuff and went inside around 9pm. Once we had a solid 10 minutes of downpouring I figured most trick or treaters had called it there. When that heavy rain started we moved everything into the garage and sat in our trunks awaiting anyone challenging the weather for candy. Sadly since we knew we had the chance of rain around 6 none of the real fun stuff ever made it outside of our screened patio.

So our Hue lights and brand new fog machine were isolated to hide from the rain. The fog machine was a new purchase to our Halloween set of toys, but Florida humidity and placing a fog machine outside was a challenge. The fog would be lifted up within seconds and pulled like a suction into the atmosphere. Sometimes we could get the fog to stick around by blasting it into our little enclosed outdoor area, but it felt like a laser tag arena when that happened.

The fog machine was what we landed on after researching dry ice, fog and more to spruce up the event. The dry ice was a fun test indoors, but trying to balance it outside and keep enough around to mystify the spin wheel was a failure.

A fog machine was even more difficult because if you want fog to stick around and not rise into the air you need a chiller to cool down the fog massively. On top of that you need a bit higher end of equipment and juice in order to perfect the fog creation. This is probably what professional haunted houses use, but for the sake of testing a Halloween we got a cheaper fog machine off Amazon to test.

However, it was not waterproof and the fog didn't do much except smell up the air and clog the garage and patio area with cloudy smoke. I thought the kids would love a bit of creepy fog, but alas they didn't. Thankfully though our music selection synced with the Hue lights on a great playlist helped rescue that situation.

So all in all it wasn't what I expected this time around and the Saturday and weather was probably to blame. I assumed a weekend Halloween would have more people than a weekday, but maybe that was the wrong assumption. Presumably a weekday Halloween has parents at home aware of the workday approaching - so probably everyone goes out right at dusk and goes home.

This time the prime hours for trick or treating was met with terrible rain so we barely had ~100 kids this year. We anticipated near ~200 so now we have about 30 leftover jello shots and 100-200 extra pieces of candy. This was probably our last Halloween at this location as Alyson and I are getting married next week then we set our eyes on moving closer to downtown.