In an era of American civilization chock full of difficulty, here’s some jubilant breaking news: It’s the best kind of weekend to be a kid.

For all its warts, the year 2021 does have one redeeming quality: There’s enough astral alignment for Halloween to fall on a day off for most schoolkids.

If you’re a child, that means you just had a week at school where you inhaled happy helpings of candy. It led up to the costumed crescendo Friday as your teachers had the class celebrate the pending holiday – which, even stacked up against Christmas, Hanukkah and others, is right up there in terms of being kid-first.

For spooky sake, this is a day where every family in town is shamed if they don’t lavish sweet, sweet sugar on you and your scary-looking, pillowcase-toting pals!

When you board the school bus home Friday afternoon, the possibility dawns on you: 60-ish hours to carve pumpkins, watch scary movies and go to haunted houses all in the lead up to tomorrow’s trick-or-treat triumph!

So, to the parents out there this weekend, let the kids be kids. After a trying two years for them, let Halloween 2021 be the memory for your son or daughter that is the Halloween memory you most cherish from childhood.

We all have one. It could be that time you were 6 years old, and you finally mustered up the courage to show everyone on the block you had the coolest homemade Spider-Man costume – one that your dad even got to shoot out silly string!

It could be that time you were 10 and you and your siblings made a haunted house that actually ended up scaring your friends who came over (even if that head tilt your Uncle Joey did as Michael Myers was a little too scary!)

Or maybe it’s that time you were 12 and your mom finally let you join your friends past nightfall for Halloween shenanigans – and it turned out to be all the adventurous, scavenging fun your preteen self craved.

COVID-19 and all of its variants is a reality in our world. Though we’ve developed treatments and vaccines in the past year-plus that help people live their lives with much more protection than in March 2020, COVID is still a thing. And it will most likely be a thing for some time longer. Like other pathogens and diseases, the pandemic, due to the airborne contagiousness of the virus, is well on its way to becoming endemic.

Reasonable people can acknowledge that present circumstance while also realizing life could and should go on with full-blast festivities. Multiple vaccines, booster shots and other effective treatments are available. And people of all socioeconomic classes have the ability, at a relatively low financial cost to them and their loved ones, to decide, from the growing list of medical options, their best way to account for COVID risk.

In a more perfect, more rational world, all of us individuals would likely come to that collective epiphany. We’d be sensible adults in a society where the well-being and cultivation of kids is our primary focus.

That’s not the country or Colorado we inhabit. Too many of us have been captured by the “new normal” psychology fostered by fear.

And that fearful funk from us moms and dads has worn off on our kids – despite however resilient they are by nature and despite the statistical reality of how low a risk the virus is to children.

It was three years ago “The Coddling of the American Mind” was published. The subhead of authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s acclaimed book was “How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation For Failure.” They outlined how, from a cognitive and behavioral standpoint, kids in recent years have been parented at home – and taught in schools and at universities – to be more fragile in the real world.

That was all pre-COVID. That was before eighth graders had the totality of their tender middle school years upended with unprecedented curbs to peer-to-peer socialization. That was before infants and toddlers entered a world with facial gestures obscured by medical masks. That was before local, state and federal government agencies cautioned us of the viral and social risk that manifests if an unvaccinated 5-year-old walks through a homemade haunted house without a facial covering underneath a Batman mask.

This holiday weekend is the time to orient society back to the kids and away from all of us – the adults who sacrificed, for our own confused comfort, our most vulnerable demographic: the kids.

The Denver Gazette editorial board