While our theme changes every year, there is at least one aspect of the Halloween house that has lasted for almost its entire history: rocks.
A few years after we started building the houses we began to invite friends and neighbors over to help us paint, as many hands would allow us to make bigger projects, and having a community project that we could all work on brought us together. Around that time, our daughter and other kids in our neighborhood wanted to be a part of the painting day. While they could help with painting big sheets of cardboard, we also wanted to give them a project of their own. That year we were making a Finding Nemo themed house and I thought it would be fun to have some blue rocks in the “aquarium” photo op area. So, we set up a kids table at the painting day for kids to paint some rocks from our yard blue.
In later years, we continued this tradition, setting up a kid’s painting station and painting the same set of rocks a different color to match the needs of that year’s house. Keen eyed viewers might spot them in different houses. Over the years those rocks have been painted many times such that if split open one might read the layers like the rings of a tree. 🙂
To honor that tradition for our 25th Anniversary, we got those rocks out again and painted them blue (representing their first layer of paint!).
We then had different people at our painting days draw a symbol for each year’s Halloween house with that year’s date to create 25 Albertson Halloween House memorial stones.
While we will keep these as fond reminders of all the past fun we have had, these rocks will also be in the 2026 Halloween house. Visitors can spot them underneath the log that Grogu is on in the forest.
Rock solid way to remember.
