ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — This certainly isn’t going to be the average Tampa Bay Halloween. While there are still events happening, many have been drastically changed, from limiting attendance to converting to full-on drive-through experiences.

When it comes to trick-or-treating, well, that’s had to adapt as well, too. The Centers for Disease Control has issued its own guidelines for trick-or-treating, including avoiding direct contact, washing hands often, making a mask a part of one’s costume, and even setting up outdoor candy service stations to keep everyone at a safe distance. The City of Tampa sent out a set of recommendations that’s essentially identical, while the City of St. Petersburg refers residents to the CDC itself.

One St. Petersburg family has taken at least one of those guidelines to heart, and erected a unique and spectacular candy delivery system in their front yard.

“This is essentially what happens when designers go stir-crazy,” says Scott Bourne of St. Pete’s Euclid St. Paul neighborhood.

Bourne is a product designer; his wife, Sandra Dohnert, is a professional photographer. Some have said that creatives have it especially rough during lockdown, but many find expressive outlets with the time and materials at hand. For Bourne, that meant creating a small tree fort for the couple’s young daughter, Mila, in the front yard.

Euclid St. Paul is a fairly tight-knit community. Many of the neighbors have young kids, and know one another from community events such as the annual Haunted Hike, during which—up until this year—families would carouse in and out of one another’s homes, all set up in different types of “haunted house” themes, during a sort of scavenger hunt.

Bourne says that while his family and neighbors were spitballing about how Haunted Hike was going to look like this year, the subject of his tree fort came up. Both things became very, very different for the season. Haunted Hike employed limited groups, QR codes and a more outdoor-centric aesthetic.

And Bourne’s tree fort became something else entirely—a full-on extraterrestrial experience, taking up most of the yard with lights, aliens and even a UFO, fashioned, of course, from the tree fort. The highlight of the experience is the candy chute, a lit length of conduit leading from the UFO to the sidewalk, where kids can catch their candy from a safe distance.

This socially distant candy delivery installation is interstellar. (Image by SandraSonik)

“Yeah, we just started kicking out ideas and it snowballed from there,” Bourne says.

It’s a fun, expressive and certainly creative way to dispense Halloween candy to trick-or-treaters, as well as a satisfying project for the whole family, and neighborhood.

You can check out other creative hands-free trick-or-treating installations from around the country here.