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PALMER — If you’re going to decorate your house and yard as thoroughly as Keith Hammonds, you’ve got to have commitment.

For instance, you’ve got to be willing to give up your crawlspace.

“Under my house, half of it is Halloween, the other half is Christmas,” he said.

And you’re going to probably give up multiple weeks each year just setting up the stuff.

“I was out there until 10 o’clock last night messing around,” Hammond said Thursday, though his goal, this year as each year, was to have the decorations up two weeks before Halloween.

“After Halloween it’s gone in two days,” said his wife, Virginia Hammonds. And the Christmas decorations come out immediately with the goal — another goal not often achieved — of having the house decorated before Thanksgiving.

So why does he do all this? Hammonds said it’s for the kids. The kids love it and so, apparently, do their school bus drivers.

“Almost every bus that comes through this neighborhood stops for about five minutes,” in front of his house, Hammonds said.

So he makes a point of getting up early to turn on the lights. A lot of kids also stop by to trick-or-treat. Hammonds said he’ll usually do something to scare those kids. This year he’ll probably be hiding on the lawn somewhere. One year he pretended to hack off a friend’s leg.

“Kids are still talking about when I chopped the guy’s leg off four years ago,” Hammonds said.

Last year, when they held a haunted house in the backyard, Virginia said that more than 300 kids came through. This year, even though they’re taking the year off on the haunted house thing, she’s put together 350 grab bags.

Which is kind of expensive, though it would be more expensive, Hammonds said, if he didn’t have such helpful friends and neighbors.

“I’ve got one friend, he doesn’t do the haunted house stuff, he goes into Costco and he brings me about 30 pounds of candy,” he said.

Neighbors who won’t be home Halloween night drop off candy they’d mistakenly purchased. And they’ll stop by when he’s out setting up the skeletons and the pumpkins to lend a hand.

Someone passing through who saw all the stuff Hammonds had put out drove to Anchorage and then back to the Valley to bring him a giant inflatable snow-globe with bats inside.

“He said, ‘here, this will look so much better in your yard than in mine,’” Hammonds recalled.

He said he’s been collecting Halloween decorations for about 12 years.

“You can’t just go out and buy all this stuff at one time,” he said. “I buy 99 percent of my stuff from garage sales.”

A person can buy a lot of high-quality decorations at a moving sale. Hammonds said he likes the older-style decorations the best, so hunting for them at garage sales suits his tastes. It’s also significantly cheaper.

Halloween, he said, isn’t as much of a drain when it comes to his utility bills. Christmas is worse that way, though, so he’s been trying to convert as much of the Christmas stuff as he can to energy efficient LED lights.

But that’s not to say his Halloween decorations don’t use electricity. He’s got strobe lights and an air cannon and a ton of battery-operated animatronic things.

“The arms crawl around all over the floor, I got a brain that talks to you,” Hammonds said, leading a tour of his creepy carport.

With all these decorations is there one he’d call his favorite?

“I like it all,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.