Halloween Decorations Competition 2023

There’s no place like Wixams on Halloween and 2023 was no exception! The streets were filled with hundreds of people making their way around the town trick-or-treating, interacting with some of the wonderful spooky displays or simply enjoying the atmosphere. One of the judges commented how cheerful everyone was, that community spirit is a large part of what makes our town such a great place to live and Halloween here so special.

This year was the fifth Halloween Decorations Competition which we run in collaboration with the Wixams Events Group. We had 18 entries and, wow, it was harder than ever to pick a winner! The judges are asked to send in their top 3 homes in order and we award each 3, 2 or 1 points, the winner is the home with the most total points. There are so many factors we have to take into account. In particular there is a massive difference in the space people can use for their displays, some have front gardens, some have massive houses and some have driveways. This just makes it all the more difficult to try and be fair to everyone, but we think we have picked the right winner 🧛🏻

Thank Yous

As always we want to say some thank yous to everyone who has helped with this competition. Thank you Steven and Dee at Welcome Co-op for sorting out the prize hamper, Budgens/Co-op have supported all our competitions since the start and we really appreciate the donation. The hamper was wrapped up in a fab Halloween theme by Faye (check out her Etsy shop here: Etsy|SpiritedIntent). This year our winners also received a £100 gift card for John Lewis donated by the Wixams Parish Council, thank you guys. Asan probably has the toughest job of everyone, he has to visit every home in the competition to get the fantastic snaps below, thank you Asan for everything you do for Wixams (Tu Plus Tu Photography tuandtu.com). The judges this year were Cecilia & the boys, Rich & Lucy, Barbara, Sheila, Adriana, Sally & James, Richard and, one of our previous competition winners, Rob. Thank you for your excellent judging skills!

This year and last we worked closely with the Events Group to put together the Halloween parties which were both a great success. Both our groups are run completely by volunteers and all profits go back into the community. We are always on the lookout for more volunteers so please use the contact form to get in touch if you’d like to help out in our future activities.

This Year’s Prize

We had a two part prize this year, a great hamper of goodies from Welcome Co-op and a £100 John Lewis gift card. We hope the winners have got stuck in already 🍬🍿🍺🍫

🥁 Our winners are…

There was only 1 point in it this year but our winners are this amazing home on Brooklands Avenue! We were really impressed by the variety of decorations, many home made including a fab man-eating wreath, how interactive it was including a snow machine and flying ghost, and how the whole family dressed up and took part in the display. They had a lot of visitors all evening who all seemed to be having a lot of fun, and that’s a large part of what makes Halloween so enjoyable. You could tell they went to a lot of effort to put it all together and they really deserve the win. Well done!

Other Entrants

We want to give a huge thank you to everyone who entered our competition. The standards were on another level and that made the judging so much more challenging. Spiders seemed to be a popular theme this year, big and small. One display had one giant spider happily sat on his web, another had a corpse wrapped up and a trail of spiders making their way to it for their dinner, eww! As usual there were some amazing carved pumpkins out there, maybe we need a competition just for that next year 🤔 We also liked all the colourful lights and interactive elements. It seems the other home on Brooklands Avenue reigns supreme in their delight in scaring people, this time with a prisoner in a cage who gave a fright to anyone brave enough to try and reach for a sweetie.

We were really pleased to see so many homes from Willow Grove (village 2) joined in the competition this year, there seemed to be a lot more people out and about there too so it looks like the Halloween magic is spreading! 👻