For some kids, Halloween, with all its creepy characters, creepy skeletons and scream-inducing fear machines, can be a little intimidating.
But for Christopher Jimenez, Halloween was one of his favorite times of the year.
“Nothing scared him. His smile was so big and he just touched the animatronics and laughed. He just enjoyed it,” said Shelly Jimenez, Chris’ mother.
Chris and his twin sister Kayla were born on February 24, 1995.
Their mother, Jimenez, said they were both born prematurely. Chris weighed only 2 pounds.
“Almost everything that could go wrong with a premature baby went wrong with Chris. He had cerebral palsy, he had vision loss due to the premature birth, he had lung disease,” Jimenez said.
After the twins were born, she became Chris’s full-time caregiver. She said she could tell from an early age that he loved Halloween.
‘He loved to go out. Like we used to drive them around all the neighborhoods looking for Halloween lights,” Jimenez said.
But in 2018, Chris’s health began to deteriorate. He could no longer go outside to look at the decorations in the neighborhood. So Jimenez came up with an idea.
“I thought I’m just going to decorate our front yard, and we’re going to wheel Chris out in his wheelchair so he can enjoy the lights and the animatronics and have fun,” Jimenez said.
She and her husband Sal went to work installing not just a few lights and crazy decorations, but building an elaborate scene filled with everything a Halloween lover could dream of, and of course it had a theme.
“In 2019, it was the creepy clown carnival,” Jimenez said.
She said Chris loved the decorations so much that the family made it an annual tradition.
One year the theme was a cemetery, the next year a swamp. She said it became so popular that people from all over the city stopped by to watch.
“We could be in the house and sitting on the couch and an animatronic would go off and you’d hear someone screaming in here and he’d just burst out laughing, he loved it,” he said.
Earlier this year, Chris passed away at the age of 29.
Jimenez said it was very hard to imagine Halloween without Chris, but after thinking about whether or not to decorate the house, she chose to do it in his honor.
“I really wanted to honor Chris in some way because he loved it so much and over all these years the community has discovered it and I know how much they enjoy it,” Shelly said.
So she and Sal once again brought out their hundreds of decorations, and this year added to their exhibit a scavenger hunt, where people can discover Chris’s favorite childhood toys hidden in the scene.
“I mean, for me, this was such a simple thing that I started just for Christopher so he can have some fun in his life and to know that it’s become so big for the community and beyond, it just makes it so I’m happy, and I’m grateful because people care,” Jimenez said.
It’s a feeling she says is overwhelming and means so much to their family.
She said she plans to continue this tradition of decorating every year and knows that every time someone jumps or screams on one of their decorations, Chris will laugh somewhere.
