photo column by Amber …

‘Arachnophobia medication’

To say that Merry Tracy-St. Pierre likes Halloween is a bit of an understatement.

It takes 34 totes of decorations, 52 tombstones, 22 electrical blow-up decorations, a bucket full of batteries, 25 to 30 extension cords, 12 strobe lights, fog machines, timers, bones, a floating head and four people over 26 hours to transform her home at 97 River Road in Livermore into the “Cursed Corner Cemetery” for Halloween.

“I love Halloween! It’s the perfect holiday,” says an exuberant Tracy-St. Pierre. “You get to eat candy, you don’t have to buy for anybody else, you face all your worse fears and you get to be somebody else for a day.”

On Halloween night, she and her family will spend 30 minutes turning on all the lights, music and moving decorations. Then they will lead trick-or-treaters through a macabre maze and into the backyard – where there are more decorations – to a large cauldron full of candy.

Each year the Halloween display, which goes up the last weekend in September, is a little different and a little bit bigger.

Tracy-St. Pierre even has plans to build a crypt.

“If it wasn’t for my family, I wouldn’t be able to do this,” she said of her husband, Jeff, and daughters Lorayanna and LaDesta Tracy.

And the decorations are a type of therapy for Tracy-St. Pierre.

“I laugh at the 8-foot spider on my roof, but I am deathly afraid of spiders. Each year I get a little better with spiders because they’re all over the house when we put up the decorations. This is like my arachnophobia medication.”

But despite loving Halloween, Tracy-St. Pierre hates basements. “They’re creepy,” she says. And she doesn’t own a black cat. “That’s just bad luck!”

She admits that on the day after Halloween, she is ready to start taking it all down.

Then a month later, it’s time to start decorating for Christmas.

“We don’t go shopping on Black Thursday, we decorate. But we’re not as extreme for Christmas!”