Holidays

Before I start talking about what went right this year, I want to go over what went wrong in the past. The first year I did any kind of display for Halloween was back in 2006. It was the first Halloween after we moved into our first and current house. I had been looking online at a lot of other people's yard haunts and decided it would be fun to do my own. We had received some gift cards from a house warming party and used those to buy the metal fencing I use today. However, because the fencing was a little on the pricey side we only fenced in about a third of our yard. We had only 6 tombstones and a noose that I hung in the tree. The decorations were nice for Halloween, but they definitely weren't going to scare anyone. On Halloween night I had creepy music playing as well as fog.

Around this time every year after all my outside Halloween decorations are up, and I am able to start putting up my inside decorations people start asking why I do it. Am I charging admission to see my display? Doesn't this take a lot of time? Are you a Satanist? The answers are no, yes, and no respectively. I could leave my answers there, but I feel each deserves a further explanation.

In regards to the first question one of the unspoken rules among home haunters is to never charge admission. While there are some haunters out there that ask for donations to help to defray costs, most that ask for donations are doing so to give to some sort of children's charity. When you start charging admission you become a commercial enterprise. As such you are subject to all sorts of nasty things such as having to abide by fire codes and having to pay royalties for any music you use in your haunt. That's not to say that your haunt shouldn't be as safe as possible. If children are touring your attraction it should be as safe as possible since it is on your property and you probably don't want to have to make a home owner's insurance claim. Again, this is another reason most people don't go commercial since home owner's insurance doesn't cover business activities and you would need to purchase more expensive business insurance.

If you have been following my photo blog you have probably seen some teaser pics from my Halloween set up for this year. If you haven't checked it out recently that's okay too. I needed to take a break from theme park posts and decided that there was no better way than to summarize my haunt progress thus far. All of the photos that are below were taken with my BlackBerry 8330 so the pictures are a little grainy. I plan on taken better pictures with my regular camera, but for the time being these will have to suffice. Over the next couple of weeks I still have more work to do and I will continue to post more pics on my photo blog. A few days before Halloween I will post a large overview of both the outside and inside of my house. Until then, enjoy this preview.

Halloween is about 83 days away so I needed to start making plans for my yard haunt display. Earlier in the day I bought about $250 worth of LED flood lights that I will be using for both Halloween and Christmas. In addition to making sure I had enough lights it was time to start testing my equipment again. In 2006 I bought a couple of fog machines (two of which were returned because they didn't meet my quality standards) to use in my haunt. The one I used that year worked for most of the night, but was obviously not meant to be ran for 3 hours straight and I think the heat exchanger went out on it. Last year I bought a Chauvet 1250 to replace my broken machine. Unfortunately the first one I received was DOA and had a bad pump. My replacement was not going to come before Halloween so I scrambled to buy one on eBay. I ended up getting one similar to the one I used in 2006, and I thought the heat exchanger on that one crapped out as well. Of course as I was writing this I wasn't satisfied with accepting that my cheap fogger was broken so I just did a quick test and was pleased to find that it still works. While I haven't been able to use my Chauvet 1250 for Halloween yet, I have been pleased with the results I have gotten during tests. Video of that test can been found below as well as tips to keep your machine in good condition

I didn't have much to say other than to wish everyone a Merry Christmas.

And as I type this I realize that a lot of people have long standing traditions, Some of mine include watching Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer, Garfield's Christmas Special, Gremlins (it does take place on Christmas Eve after all), and of course watching A Christmas Story.

This is probably it for a while. Now you'll have to excuse me as I start a new tradition of having Christmas Eve at my house and by celebrating with Bar-B-Que.