Halloween started a month ago for Doug and Carol Anne Coletti.
That’s when they started peeking into boxes containing skeletons, spiders, clowns, witches, ghosts and ghouls to start planning how they’d be used to turn their Riverview Road yard into one of the city’s most elaborate Halloween displays.
The Colettis are well-known in their North Nechako neighbourhood for their haunting habit for decorating and their scary house of horror never fails to draws hundreds of trick-or-treaters and their parents.
“We started October 1st and I took all last week off work to get it done,” said Doug Coletti. “We put a lot of work into it but it’s only about half of what we’ve got.
“People start coming by in September, saying, ‘Are you doing your Halloween stuff?”
They know they’re in for a long night tonight and they plan to stay outside the whole night. They invite all the neighbours to come over with their leftover candy supplies, once their kids have done their rounds. Everyone gathers for a block party sitting around the fire pit and portable heaters.
The Colettis start buying chocolate bars throughout the year and also look for suckers and hard candy to try to keep the costs down. During the pandemic they used a plastic piece of eavesdropping to make a candy chute to deliver the treats and kids still ask for it.
“It’s a lot of fun, we really have a good time doing it,” said Doug.
“It’s turned into an event. People come from McBride and Smithers, we get people from all over. Our neighbours might only get 12 or 13 kids and we get three or four hundred. We get a minimum 250 and if it was a Saturday or Sunday it’s close to 400. People drive in from everywhere, it’s a destination.”
The Halloween weather forecast for today is about as good as you could hope for this time of year. There’s no chance of rain or snow with high of 3 C expected and nighttime lows only dipping to -5 C, considerably warmer than it has been over the past week.
