The Whole Haunted World #8

When did Halloween yards become better than Christmas yards?

This is not actually one of the Upper Hastings Ranch houses but is instead a home a few blocks from mine that nonetheless captures the lights-’n’-inflatables mishmash of most of the Upper Hastings Ranch houses.

When I was a kid growing up in Arcadia (a suburb about twenty minutes east of downtown L.A.), my family loved Christmas. I know that might seem somewhat ironic given what holiday I’ve become an expert in, but my mom really went nuts for Christmas. Baking, decorating, dressing in festive/ugly sweaters, the whole deal.

One year we drove up into the foothills to the north and saw an amazing neighborhood where every house had extraordinary decorations. The one that has stayed with me for (ahem) sixty years now was the home that had converted their front lawn into a fake ice skating rink and filled it with life-size figures of the Peanuts characters actually moving around on the “ice.” There were also houses that projected entire Christmas specials on screens positioned around their yards…which sounds not so impressive now, but, back in the age before VCRs and cheap projectors, was remarkable.

For some time I’ve wondered where this neighborhood was, so I did some digging this year and decided it must be an area known as Upper Hastings Ranch. With our visiting friend Lynne Hansen in tow, we decided to check it out last weekend.