Come October 31, Kristy Oxenham is usually found crawling in cobwebs, bathing in blood, playing caretaker to a 3.6m clown and housing a zombified woman who once sparked a welfare check.
To put it lightly, she is a Halloween fanatic, decorating her Mt Albert home inside and out and hosting Halloween parties so out-of-this-world they require a YouTube highlights reel.
What’s turned into a six-week-long set-up, started small. In 2005, Oxenham, her husband Jason and their daughters, Ruby, Holly and Jemma, lived on a Halloween-mad street, so they decided to get stuck in too.
“We started getting the odd bits and pieces and a foam skeleton that we’ve still actually got to this day,” she tells the Herald.
From there, the collection grew, and the eyes of neighbourhood kids would light up as they spotted the Oxenham house.
“I remember kids saying ‘yours is the best house’, and the joy on the kids’ faces is what makes it worth it.”
It’s now been 20 years of the family celebrating Halloween, and Oxenham, a finance director, says each year it just gets bigger and better, to the point she has to use her finance skills to calculate how much candy she needs for the more than 300 trick-or-treaters who visit each year.
But not the “crap stuff”; if you go by Oxenham’s home, you’ll only get the quality branded candy. Husband Jason is adamant about that one thing.
They even make goodie bags for the lollies to be handed out in, with little “googly eyes” glued on for added flair.
On top of their personal collection, the couple rent pieces like rooftop gargoyles and coffins from prop rental companies.
“They know us by name now,” says Oxenham with a laugh.
The family also import decorations, craft a lot of their own and sift through Trade Me for unwanted props and office Halloween party leftovers.
When everything is in place, the front lawn and entrance way are paradise for trick or treaters, who marvel at what they can see inside, while parents giggle at the smaller details, like Australia’s Trevor Chappell’s 1981 controversial underarm bowling scene made out of skeletons and designed by Jason.
The back of the house is reserved for a party the family hosts. Previously, they’ve turned their pool water into blood and their toilet into the Game of Thrones’ Iron Throne for their friends to enjoy.
Oxenham recently started tracking the spend on decorations for both the trick-or-treaters and the party. Increased shipping costs from global suppliers and postal forwarding costs from companies that won’t send to New Zealand directly added to the pinch.
“It wasn’t really until I had this app on my phone that I could actually code everything that it was a lot more than I thought, and I was like, ‘Oh shit, I better not tell Jason’,” laughs Oxenham.
Storing the props comes with its own challenges - their garage is so full it can’t fit all the cars it’s meant to, and a neighbour’s daughter once caught a glimpse inside and urged her mother to get a welfare check on “an injured woman in the garage”. Thankfully, it was a zombified mannequin.
“It’s kind of embarrassing because we’ve had a couple of instances where when you sell something on Trade Me, and when they arrive to pick it up and we’ve got we’ve got skeletons on nails all through the garage. You see these people thinking, ‘shit, is this safe?’” says Oxenham.
This Halloween, the couple were ready to finally listen to the pleas of their friends and open the house to the public, selling tickets for a small fee that would go to a good cause.
But six weeks of decorating takes a lot out of a person, and Oxenham wasn’t sure she or Jason had it in them this year. And there was the cost to consider.
Jason, an award-winning photographer and Herald photo journalist, has multiple myeloma – a blood cancer that develops in the bone marrow, and has been in Shanghai for a clinical trial.
The treatment came with a significant cost of over $500,000, which they self-funded and crowd-funded for through Givealittle. There were no viable treatments available to Jason in New Zealand, and he wanted a chance to see his teenage daughters grow up.
The couple hoped the spooky Halloween tours would contribute towards the cost of further treatment Jason is likely to need or for research into the disease.
The family moved all the plans to next year, and suppliers were happy to accommodate.
It was Jason who suggested they should skip this year, but he did it on Father’s Day, knowing he held some sway on that day.
“It’s obviously something that I really enjoy and usually rejuvenates me. But just this time, when Jason said, ‘Do you think we shouldn’t do it? I think he thought it was going to go down really badly. But he was shocked at me agreeing,” Oxenham says.
While Jason’s Shanghai treatment originally looked to be unsuccessful, a third CAR T attempt gave them some positive results, time, and some options for further treatment in China, which will cost over $250,000.
Oxenham says Jason’s energy levels are up to the point that he can now walk their dog for 45 minutes.
During her husband’s treatment in China, Oxenham was at his side. But she’s been battling with burnout, which will require an iron transfusion to help her recover.
“When I was in Shanghai for those two and a half months, I worked remotely from a desk in the hospital room. Sometimes the doctors came in at a certain time, I’d have to jump off and then get back on to deal with work,” says Oxenham.
She even managed a whole acquisition for her company from Jason’s bedside, before returning home to help organise a photo exhibition fundraiser and the media surrounding it. To add fuel to the fire, the couple also got a new puppy hell bent on destroying anything at ground level.
As October 31 creeps up, the family have decided they will still decorate a small portion of their front entrance for trick-or-treaters. They know the neighbourhood will be asking why “The Halloween house” isn’t ready yet.
And they won’t be short on visitors. Every year, Oxenham says she’s seen a growing appetite for the spooky season, with more houses decorating and more kids dropping in.
She hasn’t spotted any true fanatics who could come close to stealing her skull-encrusted Halloween crown, but says it’s not a competition, it’s about the joy it brings.
“It invigorates you. I think it’s a creative outlet. Being a finance person, it talks to the creative side of my brain. And when you’re dealing with numbers and stuff all day, it gives you time to sort of check out of reality. I just love it.”