Fall 2016

Alna family gets festive

Tue, 10/04/2016 - 7:30am

    West Alna Road travelers have a new treat this Halloween season, a yard aglow with orange and other festive-colored lights highlighting an elaborate display. The Kellett family spent Saturday afternoon putting it together, mostly of decorations a Bristol woman gave them.

    The woman used to decorate for her grandchildren, now grown, Amanda Kellett, an administrator at Wiscasset Family Medicine, said. Now, Kellett, husband Michael and sons, Eben, 12, and Jack, 15 months, are enjoying them and she hopes passers-by will, too. She said Jack likes the decorations and others inside the home, where his high chair is positioned to face them, she added. Saturday evening, he had on a skeleton shirt his grandmother got him.

    In front of the house are two inflatable decorations taller than any of the Kelletts, including Michael, a shipfitter at Bath Iron Works. One is a smiling black cat with lit eyes; the other, a smiling witch sitting on a jack-o-lantern. The tip of the cat’s tail and the tip of the witch’s hat each reach higher than the start of the roof. A smaller balloon decoration near the center of the yard is a play on the flamingo lawn ornament — two black flamingos with pink, lit eyes.

    Eben, a seventh grader at Gardiner Regional Middle School, said his favorite items in the display are the graves with a skeleton and casket and cross markers wrapped in orange lights. A black, Gothic fence with spiders runs part way around the graves.

    A “Scream”-like mask is nestled in some corn husks, near a small, black-blanket-costumed figure wearing high-top sneakers. In front of it are four glowing, smiling ghosts.

    Halloween is one of Amanda Kellett’s favorite times of year. She sees it as the start of the holiday season. “And it’s just got a unique sort of feel. It’s so fun, and festive.”

    They missed decorating one Halloween because they moved into the home in November, and another Halloween when she was pregnant with Jack. But this year they decided to go big, with the help of the items the Bristol woman gave them. She also gave them Christmas decorations.

    “I think it’s great,” Michael Kellett said about the Halloween decorations all around him in the yard. “I can’t wait ‘til Christmas!”