That’s because Cinnamon is actually a fork of an ancient Gnome release
mate is what originally spawned from gnome 2. while cinnamon was built from gnome 3, it has been completely separated from it for a decade.
both are under active development, run current applications, and offer what would be described as a more 'traditional' desktop environment (compared to gnome shell or ubuntu's unity). they're both lighter-weight then gnome, with mate being a bit leaner than cinnamon.
mint would be my suggestion for op, and any of the default mint desktops, including their other option--xfce, would be suitable for op's use case.
that's the whole reasoning behind having LMDE. seems a little redundant today; but within a release or two mint may very well be only based on debian itself, with the way canonical is steering ubuntu.
there was different trick-or-treat "events" on saturday and sunday here, so as few as 360 if the same schedule holds for those things next year (weekend before a halloween that falls on a 'school night').
every. damn. day. the worst might be i get to the outer door at the office, ready to go outside. and i just stop. 30 seconds later, shake my head a bit and go 'oh yea. i'm leaving now'.
this gen x'er isn't keen on the idea, either. before the days of cell phones, the street lights coming on was the cue it was time to go home--and we could go pretty much anywhere in our (small) town. and later as a teen when we lived close to a city, all mom wanted to know was whether i'd be home for supper. there was no worry because every 'horrible' thing to happen to a kid wasn't published or broadcast for the world to see.