Tips on Decorating Your Home for Halloween

Tips on Decorating Your Home for Halloween

Halloween is a fun holiday accompanied by imaginative decorations, more sweets than anyone should consume habitually, and good times for all ages. Holding your own Halloween party can be a lot of fun, providing you put some thought into the planning. Here are some tips on things to consider when preparing and decorating your home for Halloween.

First of all, when hosting a Halloween party in your home, it is important to consider age appropriate decorations during the planning stages. While blood, monsters and tombstones may be appropriate for teenagers and adults, this type of decoration can leave smaller children with nightmares for several weeks.

Another important step in party preparation that can save time and anguish after the event is protecting the surfaces of your furniture. Halloween costumes often involve makeup, colored hair sprays, and fake tattoos. Decorations may involve silly string, crepe paper, fake blood, and a variety of fruits and vegetables. All of these can leave accidental stains that can be difficult to remove from couches and chairs.

To protect their couch upholstery, many hosts and hostesses find that slipcovers are a cost effective solution. After the party, they can be taken off, cleaned in the washing machine, and reused again next year at Halloween. If purchased in the traditional Halloween colors of orange or black, slipcovers can also make the decorations more effective.

To protect your tables from accidental spills, use tablecloths, which look even better if they’re Halloween-themed. Tablecloths made from PVC are useful as they can easily be wiped clean. Alternatively, you could make your own using an old sheet and decorate it with hand prints or painted spiders.

If you’re having a sit-down meal, it’s worth using inexpensive dining chair slipcovers on your seats, both to protect them from food spills and to color coordinate them with the rest of your decorations.

Once the furniture is all protected by slipcovers and tablecloths, the following ideas might add to the ambience of an adult Halloween party of monstrous fun:

• Dry ice hidden in black pots, behind curtains, or under table cloths
• Black netting draped into corners with plastic spiders and bugs randomly attached
• Snakes strategically placed coming from under cushions, cabinets, or along window sills
• Tombstones fashioned from poster board with a special epitaph for each guest
• Piles of shrunken heads fashioned from carving faces on apples and allowing them to dry
• Bowls of eyeballs fashioned from white powdered doughnut holes and black and red icing

For adult Halloween parties, black out curtains are quite effective, and exchanging the regular light bulbs in lamps and light fixtures to red ones can be dramatic as well. Some hosts and hostesses even use black lights for a more frightening experience.
For a children’s Halloween party, decorations should concentrate on fun rather than the scare factor. Children find the following ideas appealing:

• Jack-O-Lanterns with comical faces
• Silly String spider webs with a variety of ants, lizards, and bugs
• Funny bony skeletons
• Tootsie Roll Pop ghost trees made from a tissue tied over this treat with a ribbon and dotted with eyes
• A curtain of wet spaghetti noodles hanging just low enough to touch the top of little heads
• Black and Orange balloons with silly faces glued onto them

Although the goal of decorating for a Halloween party is to provide entertainment for the guests, this task can also be an enjoyable experience for the family giving the party. Imaginative ideas are all over the web, and most are quite inexpensive. And if you take care to protect your furniture when putting up the decorations, you can really relax and enjoy your party!

Thanks to Simon Phillips from HalloweenPartyIdeas.org for the guest post!