Features

If you were to stop by Lisa Hampton’s Swoyersville home and mistake it for a gift shop, that would be understandable.

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Lisa Hampton’s pumpkins, gourds and ghosts are never the standard-issue variety.

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A kitchen isn’t just for cooking if you ask Lisa Hampton. It’s also for decorating. Hampton’s kitchen is awash in wreaths, Boyd Bears, Halloween stockings, candles and ornaments.

S. JOHN WILKIN photos/THE TIMES LEADER

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This Halloween season, decorative items are absolutely everywhere in the three-story Chapel Street structure, the bathroom not excepted. There, among a host of harvest and other seasonal d�cor, a sign informs, “The Witch Is In.”

Elsewhere, ornamental pumpkins and gourds galore rest among dried-oak flowers. A blackbird perches atop a light fixture. Scattered scarecrows sport orange and brown, and even the curtains have been changed out. They’re orange and black for the appropriate period.

Fake spider webs dangle in different locations, such as over Hampton’s mom’s old tea set, which sits on the living-room coffee table. A black runner dresses another table, a wooden dining table that holds wooden witches, a black menorah and sparkling leaves.

But is it all enough?

“I still look for more,” Hampton, 47, told a recent visitor while surveying her treasures. “I just love the fall.”

She noted the scents of crisp air, burning wood and pumpkin-spice coffee, which she sips every morning and evening.

Visitors also might be soothed by candle scents of “warm pumpkin pie” and “cinn-ister.”

“Even when you walk by and it’s not on, it smells so good,” Hampton said of the cinnamon-and-sugar scent of the latter candle. “It’s cozy.”

Hampton has lived in Swoyersville with her husband, Terry, for seven years. She said she begins decorating for Halloween and the fall season as soon as Sept. 1 hits but starts getting excited for the process in July.

“I have diagrams,” she said, explaining it takes about two days to make every room look its best. The decorations “have to be placed right.”

Family members, including Terry — who Hampton said “indulges my craziness” — and 25-year-old daughter Ashley Bennett of Courtdale, know not to get in the way.

“She’s sort of picky,” Bennett joked. “I say ‘Don’t touch anything; this house is for show.’ ”

She kids, of course, because the decked-out house is often the site of family get-togethers, and the atmosphere adds to the fun and conversation.

“This is a Dundee house,” Hampton said, noting a majority of the items were purchased at Dundee Gardens in Hanover Township or Country Folk in Nescopeck.

Most of the items are storable, as opposed to high-maintenance.

“I have one real houseplant,” Hampton said. “Oddly enough, it’s a spider plant, so it fits me.”

Come Halloween, she’ll be part of the visuals, too, as she dresses as a witch to entertain trick-or-treaters, who are sometimes afraid of her house until she offers a plethora of candy.

“I buy bags and bags,” she said. “We have a good turnout here.”

Trick-or-treaters may or may not know what lies ahead when they approach the house’s exterior, which has nothing on the interior. A cornstalk and a broomstick adorn the front door, and a pumpkin glows inside a Gothic-style window on the third floor.

“At night, he’s fantastic,” Hampton said.

Think it’s all rest and relaxation after Oct. 31 though? Hardly.

Once all the Halloween excitement dies down, decorating begins in earnest for Christmas. And, yes, Hampton is just as mad about that season, in a decorative sort of way, of course.