Last night little one experienced trick or treating for the first time. How do condo kids in downtown Toronto go trick or treating? There are some small patches of houses not too far from here, but the following is a more interesting idea.
We were invited to a friend’s building to experience Halloween there. Their condo building in the Harbourfront area have a Family Committee that, from time to time, organize events for the families in the building. The building has a large number of units, and units with decent-size layouts so they tend to attract families with young kids who want to stay living downtown.
Ok, so what did they organize this Halloween? Building residents could opt-in to participating in Halloween festivities by putting their unit number on a list that would be circulated to those who wanted to take their kids trick or treating in the building. They also put a pumpkin decoration on their door – as a signal for those who didn’t get their hands on the list of participating units. While the number of units that participated were quite low percentage-wise, there were still plenty of units who took part as the building has such a large number of units to begin with.
So, we started at one of the upper floors and, with unit list in hand, made our way from floor to floor (using the stairwell) and the kids trick or treated in a nice climate-controlled setting. The festivities lasted one hour (so, shorter than houses would do) and was followed right after by a party in the party room (which was fairly ‘meh’ but points for trying).
I thought this was a fantastic idea – and one that other condo buildings downtown could emulate. Of course, your building would likely need a decent amount of kids to pull this off.