Few things will make you feel at one with your neighborhood quite like a block party.
Our official neighborhood block party is held on a Saturday night in August, usually just as the kids are returning to school. It’s on one of those last fleeting weekends of summer, when you’re frantically trying to scratch off the scenic camping trip or the visit the zoo or whatever other last-minute activity remains on your summer bucket list. Some years we’re around and make the block party, some years we don’t.
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But our unofficial neighborhood block party is held two months later, around Halloween. It’s much smaller – limited to a few blocks rather than crisscrossing the entire neighborhood – but just as much fun nonetheless.
For us, it all started about five or six years ago. Like all things that begin small, we didn’t really think ahead to how it would ultimately grow over the years.
As is common across Naperville and elsewhere, we would gather with neighbors after taking our kids trick-or-treating together. My wife would make a Crock Pot of chili, friends would bring dips and sides and such, and we’d all sit in our driveway enjoying an adult beverage or two. There wasn’t much to it. Not much planning or fuss, even less aspiration.
After this happened for a couple of years in a row, it became clear that we had a burgeoning tradition on our hands. What was one Crock Pot grew to seven or eight. What were a half dozen chairs in our driveway became three or four times that, and our good friends behind us started wheeling their portable fire pit over so we had something to warm our chilled trick-or-treating hands by.
No one recalls exactly when the whole thing reached the tipping point from impromptu gathering to planned event, but Halloween 2013 sticks out for me. I recall that as the year that, with rain in the forecast, we brought in several tents to cover the driveway end to end, keeping all those chairs and Crock Pots dry in the fall elements.
Then last year, we took things up a notch, securing a permit to shut off the street for a stretch spanning four to five houses on each side. It rained again, so we had the tents out in the street with the whole area blocked by barricades with flashing lights. Motorists were a little confused, but everything was done safely and properly.
Little did we know that a change in city ordinance would make that the one and only year our Halloween block party would be held in our street. A new city code limits street closures for block parties to just cul-de-sacs so we back to the driveway again this year, with our largest turnout yet. A small sacrifice to make in the name of greater public safety, I suppose.
And, like any good party, it felt more at home on a Saturday, as Halloween was last year. So we decided to break with that part of the tradition. No longer would the Halloween block party be held on Halloween after trick-or-treating, but rather on the last Saturday of October, whether it was Halloween or not.
But again, little did we know that this year the Chicago Cubs would be playing in their first World Series in 71 years. So, as planning for the annual Halloween block party kicked into high gear, some among us also discussed group viewing options for the momentous Cubs games.
Several families agreed to rotate viewing at their homes throughout the series. Like many this past weekend, we found ourselves at the collision of a must-see Cubs game and long-standing Halloween weekend party plans.
Quickly what were separate Halloween block party and Cubs viewing party efforts suddenly merged into one big Halloween block party/Cubs viewing party this past Saturday night for Game 4.
With shutting down the street no longer an option, our neighbor on the corner graciously offered his driveway for the combo festivities, with cable strung to a flat screen TV showing the Cubs from his garage. All in all, not a bad viewing venue for those of us not fortunate enough to score game tickets and unwilling to pony up $500 to watch from the bars in Wrigleyville.
So there we gathered, an estimated 100 of us or so, many of us in shorts and short sleeves on a rare 70-degree day for an even rarer Cubs World Series appearance. I don’t mean to suggest the game’s outcome was secondary – the Cubs lost that game 7-2 to go down three games to one in the series – but on the balance, it was probably the best neighborhood block party yet.
And that’s not too shabby.
Rob Manker is a freelance writer who lives and parents in Naperville.
Twitter: @RobManker