Trunk or Treat: Pandemic-Style

I think we all agree that 2020 came with challenges.  Most activities for the year were cancelled due to the pandemic.  By the time October came, our church decided it was important to have an activity for the children so we decided to proceed with our annual Trunk or Treat.  We looked for creative ways to be safe and socially distance.  I think most actually enjoyed the challenge.  There were a lot of fun ideas.  I'm not sure what made me think of this, but I decided to hand out the candy using a "vending machine".  

When the children approached the vending machine, my husband instructed them to put their bag at the end of the chute and speak into the machine their choice of candy.  

This is a close-up I took after the event was over and it was partially disassembled.  You can see here that as we ran out of a particular candy I would put an out of stock sticker over that selection.  It wasn't easy to access the candy that was actually inside the "machine", so this was the best I could do.  

This photo is bad, but I wanted to show the set up behind the scenes.  We arranged the candy on a shelf behind the vending machine with each candy labeled with its corresponding vending number.  I was standing behind the machine listening to the selection each child chose, and I would quickly drop it down the chute (seen to the right of this picture).  Occasionally the machine would "malfunction" and send extra candy, especially toward the end when I still had a lot of candy left.  It was fun, and the children (and adults) really got a kick out of it!

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I had nothing to do with this one (other than letting them borrow a few items), but I wanted to post it because I loved it.  My niece and nephew set up this lumberjack theme and handed out the candy using a remote control Jeep (that matched their own Jeep).  I thought it was so clever and cute!