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October 22, 2006
FINAL, Home & Garden page G3
Halloween HAPPY | ||
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| Jennifer Lamontagne has traveled from her home in Saco at least once a week to haunt Spirit, a Halloween superstore by the Maine Mall, since it opened on Sept. 1. She visits the store so often that the manager knows her by name. On this particular visit, Lamontagne brought along her laptop showing her design of a Halloween tableau she's creating on her front lawn. Her primary mission today: Buying a pair of demon wings for her 12-year-old son Lance, who will surely look frightful when he jumps out of the family's homemade graveyard on Halloween night and scares the you-know-what out of trick-or-treaters. By that time, Lamontagne will have spent at least $500 adding new, scary things to her yard. ''I love Halloween,'' Lamontagne said. ''I think it has to do with the fact that I get to be a kid.'' Halloween is huge, and so is outdoor decor related to the holiday. A new survey from the National Retail Federation shows consumers are expected to spend $4.96 billion on Halloween this year, up from $3.29 billion just a year ago, on candy, decorations, costumes and other Halloween-related paraphernalia. Kathy Grannis, spokesperson for the retail group, said much of the surge in spending is fueled by young adults, who see it as a party holiday. Theme parks around the country are holding special Halloween events, and trick-or-treaters are now being allowed to visit college campuses, she said. Retailers are responding to this surge in spending by adding Halloween goods to their inventory, or increasing the number of items they carry. The Home Depot in South Portland, for example, is stocking Halloween decor for the first time this year, including outdoor decor. In the National Retail Federation survey, 67 percent of consumers said they plan to buy Halloween decor this year, and 48.6 percent said they plan to decorate their home or yard. Dressing up the outside of your home for Halloween has moved way beyond a couple of carved pumpkins and a cut-out of a flying witch taped to the window. Graveyards are hot. So are bloody body parts and gruesome latex monsters, such as the Tormented Zombie, who screams as he pulls the top of his own head off. Inflatables are popular, too, as well as light sculptures shaped like trees and ghosts. Halloween decor falls into two categories, cutesy and gory. Sue Clark of Bristol, who has been decorating the roadside by her home for about five years now, falls somewhere in between. She doesn't like too much gore, but builds a graveyard every year and makes homemade monsters to put in the woods. ''I personally don't think (gore) has anything to do with Halloween,'' she said. ''I don't like 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre.' That's not a scare, that's shock. Scare is the ghosts, the paranormal-type things, the skeletons.'' Clark, like many people who become addicted to decorating their homes and lawns, started out small, with just a couple of gravestones and a couple of ghosts hanging in the trees. She has added more and more every year, and today her spooky scene attracts repeat visitors. Her graveyard has tombstones with funny names and inscriptions, featuring the families of Perry Normal and I. Emma Nutt and interlopers such as Izzy Dedd. Clark occasionally buys items, but she is more of a traditionalist and likes making her own monsters - a demon cooking bones in a cauldron, for example - from materials she gathers herself. She makes basic monster forms from things like <sup>3/<sub>8-inch threaded rods, two-by-fours and lots of PVC pipe, then she can change the costumes from year to year. She picks up Styrofoam wig heads for $3 each to use as ghost heads ''and they last forever. They don't get ruined by the weather.'' This year, she's turning an old wire spool into a witch's cauldron. She's also putting together her own ''Smashing Pumpkins'' band, using skeletons she bought at a big box store, PVC, plastic pumpkin drums, a toy guitar and a keyboard. Clark's piece de resistance this year is a motorized flying ghost she's making herself, complete with a crypt to keep it dry (Latin inscription: ''If you can read this, you're overeducated.'') ''It's a lot of work,'' she said, ''and a lot of swearing.'' BIG SALES IN MAINE Clark estimates she's spent $200 to $300 on her Halloween tableau. At the other end of the spectrum are the folks Ann Dunbar runs across in the Spirit store. Dunbar, who manages the South Portland store, said she has one regular customer who has already spent his boo-time budget ''and he's borrowing money to get him through Halloween.'' ''We get so many people who say we wish you would stay open all year long,'' Dunbar said. ''This store, when it opened, was one of the No. 1 stores in the company, because people in Maine love Halloween. I don't know if it's because of the weather, the change, I don't know why.'' Both cutesy and gory have a home at Spirit, where unsuspecting consumers eye wholesome-looking lighted pumpkins in the window just before walking into the store to be greeted by an animated Freddy Kreuger figure promising to eviscerate them. In the rear of the store, a genial lawn ghost evokes the spirit of Caspar. A few feet away, a Restless Groom in a tux holds up the rotating, bloody head of his bride by her white veil. (Hey buddy, next time you're feeling restless, how about a walk around the block instead?) Dunbar said shocking - bleeding corpse fountain, anyone? - generally wins over sweet. Some local firefighters, she said, recently came in and bought a whole cart full of bloody body parts for their Halloween party. Graveyards are popular, too. Dunbar said it's the hard-core Halloween fans who go for things like the Animated Death Crawler, a latex zombie torso that moans while dragging himself across the room on his forearms. ''Oh, that's awful,'' a woman shopping with her son said as she watched Chest Ripper scream and claw his own chest open to reveal his beating heart. Awful, maybe, but lucrative. Mr. not-so-unexplained chest pain goes for $149.99. So does a 6-foot Dracula that does his own little comedy routine. (''OK, so stop me if you've heard this one. What did the boy vampire say to the girl vampire? Hey, is that you, ghoulfriend?'') Animated figures are more popular than still ones, but Dunbar notes you can put something like the Lady of the Lake, which has poseable arms, in a tree and let the wind do the work. Dunbar said it's not necessary to spend a lot of money to add some creep factor to your home. ''We've sold hundreds of these,'' she said, pointing to $5.99 porch light covers shaped like pumpkins and ghosts. A ''Beware'' or ''Haunted House'' sign goes for $5.99. Decapitated heads, which hang like strings of fish all over the store, can be had for $24.99. STARTING IN AUGUST But some people love Halloween so much they just can't help themselves. ''I'm not going to go take out a mortgage on the house to do Halloween,'' said Jennifer Lamontagne, ''but every year we put at least $500 more into it.'' Lamontagne starts putting everything together indoors in August. Everything starts going outside on Oct. 1. Her children, 12-year-old Lance and 13-year-old Tasha, love to help, and say creating their haunted abode is just as much fun as trick or treating was when they were younger. ''The funnest part is scaring people,'' Lance said. The family's lawn has a graveyard with a fence around it that's made of paint stir sticks nailed together and draped in cobwebs. Trick-or-treaters must navigate a path to the front porch (illuminated with a black light) and a big cauldron of candy. There are lots of lights, hair-raising sound effects and spine-tingling creatures on the prowl, including Lamontagne herself, who dresses up as a ''gauze zombie'' on Halloween night. Sometimes it's a little too much for small children. ''They're too scared to actually walk up the driveway, but they love standing there watching it,'' Lamontagne said. That's when Lamontagne takes the hat off her mostly black costume so the children can see her face, and offers them candy from a small cauldron she carries with her. ''Here,'' she tells them, ''you can trick or treat right here. You don't have to walk any further.'' Staff Writer Meredith Goad can be contacted at 791-6332 or at: mgoad@pressherald.com | ||
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