You are no doubt familiar with Candy Cane Lane if you live in or around Edmonton. It's the section of 148th Street just south of 98th Avenue (where 147 Street merges with it creating what turns out to be an officially named (Isabelle Connelly) park and continues south for about 1148 metres until 148th street ends and turns eastward to become 92nd Avenue for a half block before becoming the new 147th street (then becoming 92A Ave) where the Christmas decorations kind of fizzle out.
It's nothing more than a lot of houses putting out elaborate Christmas decorations, really, though they do supplement with food bank donations and sleigh rides and all sorts of bells and whistles. Except, of course, during the Wuhan Flu debacle when the Viro Fascists at City Hall banned walking on sidewalks.
However, there's a good chance you aren't familiar with Candy Cane Lane's unofficial Halloween competitor.... Pumpkin Lane? Ghosts and Goblins Lane? Okay, they need to work on coming up with a term for it. Where it is, it's along Summerside Grande Boulevard, the road that leaves the (private, but the bragging by residents is very very very public) Summerside Beach at 88th Street and runs approximately 1017 metres to the traffic circle roundabout at 70th Street. In other words, 89% as long as Candy Cane Lane. They could barely have planned it better.
The best part about it is that its apparently relatively new (the couple people I've heard about it from don't think it happened pre-COVID), so what ends up happening is late September/early October people start putting out their decorations. Then by mid-October (weather permitting) pretty much everybody who is going to decorate (about 4-5 houses didn't, which isn't that much different than Candy Cane lane) has finished decorating. However, what happens then is that some neighbours have brought in even more elaborate decorations than the previous year, which causes a mini Halloween-decorating arms race where the decorations get added to and replaced and become more and more elaborate in the days leading up to All Saint's Day. Indeed reports are it started this year before 9/11, so it could be insanely elaborate even before this gets posted.
In general, the north side of the street gets more of the decorations than the southside, possibly due to amount of sun they get in their front versus their back. The northside also gets in the spirit earlier, leaving the southern neighbours playing the most catchup.
Also, you'll have to get there later in the day, especially on weekdays, as most of the houses with inflatable decorations don't leave them plugged in all day:
Don't bother walking around the rest of the neighbourhood either, a block off in either direction the number of decorated houses falls to approximately zero:
In a preview for this year, I thought I'd share some of the highlights from last year's edition (click on any of the images to see them "full" sized). Also if you live on this street and you don't see your house, my apologies but there is so much to see it's hard to capture it all. I'm currently working on a YouTube video that will show the full scope of these decorations:
And finally, the scariest home decoration of all:
