This Halloween, we’re making an entrance. Not with our costumes, that is for sure. I am not all that proficient at sewing, and I must confess that we just bought my daughter’s costume secondhand at a thrift store. It is homemade from some home, though. Guilt, guilt.
No, I like decorating our house instead. Kids grow and you need to make them costumes every year – the nerve! Houses, well, sometimes they grow, but generally they stay the same approximate dimensions.
We have the usual skeletons and mini-pumpkins in the trees and spiders and black cats on the window. Gradually, I’ve also been creating custom Halloween entrance decorations that suit our house.
A couple of years ago, I created a miniature haunted house for our front yard. I cut holes in a piece of plywood and cut the wood to size, painted it white, and added black features like spooky windows. I can store it flat and bang it together with a few tack nails in under half an hour. Then I add glow sticks or other spooky-looking colors to shine through the windows. I figure if the kids are scared, all the more candy for me.
If all goes well, this year I plan to work with some black fabric that I have in the basement. The plan is to cut it so that it drapes around our front porch and then adorn it with white bats. Then I would like to install a florescent light on the porch just for Halloween so that the bats will glow.
All of this pales in comparison to our neighbors’ antics. Said neighbor is a movie props person and has created a sheet that fits the entire front of his house. A few days before Halloween, the sheet turns a house into a castle that glows. They have a light that shines a wicked-looking monster face into the tree across from their property, and the entire front entrance of their home is littered with coffins that pop up and other macabre paraphenalia. It’s really quite amazing.
Do you decorate for Halloween? Is the decorating in your neighborhood as wild as it is in mine?