Halloween decorations Archives - View from the Front Porch

30 10, 2023

Halloween Decorations

By judythemorgan|2023-10-12T15:37:58-05:00October 30th, 2023|Holidays, Make Me Think Monday|1 Comment

Halloween yard decorations have become as popular as Christmas decorating.

Ghosts swing from trees to greet early morning walkers in neighborhoods. Jack-o-lanterns light the way in the late afternoon. Witches crashed into trees and giant spiders in spidery webs crawl on the shrubbery.

In the 1900s, Halloween wasn’t so much about zombies and gruesome headless monsters, tombstones and skeletons, or other scary, scary things like spook houses and ghost tours. Back then, crepe paper pumpkins, plastic candy containers, painted tin noisemakers, and paper lanterns were the items of choice for a happy Halloween.

Not many of these items are around today because people used them and then threw them away. Last week, I dug out what’s left of my vintage decorations.

Only a few things are still around:

Pumpkins constructed from honeycomb tissue.

A gauze mask

A paper-mache jack-o-lantern

A tin noisemaker

A couple of black cats I used for old bulletin board posters and chalk tray decorations in classrooms

Check out Kovels’ Pinterest page here to see other vintage Halloween collectibles

Do you have a future Halloween collectible among your Halloween decorations?

Antique experts predict these items might be a future collectible:

Special holiday bottles and cans with special holiday flavors like Gruesome Grape, Spooky Strawberry, and Orange Ogre. Look for other limited-edition plastic bottles with scary faces.
Plastic candy containers either reproductions of the 1950s and ’60s figures and jack-o-lanterns or contemporary plastic decorations with clever designs.
Zombies and vampires of plastic, rubber, or resin-like zombie-hand candleholders.
Charm bracelets with pumpkins, bats, and black cats; jointed skeleton earrings decorated with rhinestones and spider rings.
Motion, or voice, activated figures that light up or emit scary sounds and music. Look for pumpkin men, witches, vampires, black cats, and body parts like crawly hands.
Paper or plastic masks, costumes, treat bags, and dolls.

If you’re thinking about increasing your collection, there’ll be some good buys at reduced prices after Halloween, and don’t throw away the items you have. You might have some vintage treasures like mine one day.

Halloween Costumes

By judythemorgan|2022-10-30T18:13:16-05:00October 31st, 2022|Holidays, Make Me Think Monday|0 Comments

A little synchronicity going on with blogs this Halloween.

Chicken Wrangler Sara’s post for last Friday about crayon costumes she’d made for her children arrived for me to schedule as I was searching through my stash of pictures for a Halloween costume photo to use for my blog today. As I told her, great minds think alike.

My search for the photo of her brother and sister in their costumes turned into more of a search than I wanted. I discovered two things:

#1 The albums I used back in the 1970s were disintegrating. The pictures were fine the photo holders not so much.

Not a big problem. Now I know there’s an issue. I’ll switch all those photos to albums like the other years before cell phone photography and cloud storage.

#2 Daughter #2 (the one in the picture) had the photograph.

That proved to be more of an issue. After texting Daughter #2, I learned she did have the photo I wanted for sure along with several others. All taken with permission. However, she couldn’t find the photo of her and her brother in Halloween costumes.

Thus began the great Halloween picture search at our family gathering to watch the opening game of the World Series. She brought a huge pile of pictures for us to search through as we sipped craft beer and cheered the Astros.

No luck that night so her search continued.

No luck the next day or the next. “No worries,” I said through my disappointment.

Then I got a text late Sunday afternoon: “I never did find the original but suddenly remembered that I had scanned it in on my old phone!!” The photo we’d been searching for was included. I had to laugh at the full circle…snapshot to jpg. Computers to the rescue.

Here’s the picture. Our son is in a devil costume I made and daughter #2 is one of the three blind mice. (Back then Halloweens were kinder and gentler.)

After that buildup, you’ll probably find the photo anti-climactic, but don’t miss the paper decorations in the windows.

4 Ideas for Celebrating Halloween during the Pandemic

By judythemorgan|2020-10-12T07:53:37-05:00October 12th, 2020|Make Me Think Monday|0 Comments

Our morning walks are getting spooky as neighbors began to decorate for Halloween.

This yard decoration is not my favorite.

Not a fan of spiders period. Especially giant eyed spiders surrounded by ghosts and blinking jack-o-lanterns.

The yard pictured below with a recreation of Washington Irving’s 1820 “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is more what I think of when I think of spooky and scary.

I love how the short story about a headless horseman who terrorizes the real-life village of Sleepy Hollow resurfaces at Halloween every year. It’s America’s first ghost story—and one of its scariest.

This doozy 2020 is scary enough on its own. Not sure we even need a Halloween this year, and I know the CDC will not be encouraging us to knock on random doors and share treats with strangers.

We don’t celebrate Halloween at our house. With only Buster and Finn around, it’s like a repeat of all the fireworks on the Fourth of July, too much noise.

But for those of you who do celebrate and need some social distancing ideas for this year, let me suggest four.

Spooky meals

Plan a spooky dinner with things like spaghetti eyeballs, Jack o’ lantern quesadillas, witch’s hair pasta, Dead Man’s Finger hot dogs. Or a breakfast of Vampire doughnuts. Have everyone—mom and dad included—dress in costume!

Find more great ideas here and here

A Candy Search or Scavenger Hunt

Like Easter egg hunts, hide individual pieces of candy around the house or yard and let the kids fill bags or plastic pumpkins with the bounty they find.

Or provide hints to follow for a spooky scavenger hunt to search for a pre-filled plastic pumpkin for each kid. Mom or Dad can hide and jump-scare older kids along the route.

Spend an evening watching spooky movies

Turn the lights out and have plenty of popcorn and candy treats available. Movie choices are almost endless from tame (It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!) to terrifying (Annabelle) and lots in between (Hocus Pocus).

Find movie suggestions at Rotten Tomatoes or Good Housekeeping.

Take a ride around the neighborhood and enjoy the Halloween displays.

If you neighborhood is like ours, it’ll be a scary ride.

Halloween won’t be the same this year, it’s true. Not much has been since COVID-19 arrived. But we can enjoy the seasons by finding new ways to approach what we’ve had to put aside for now.