Halloween Decorating and Entertaining Ideas

I love Halloween and I love fall and one of the ways I like to celebrate the season is to decorate my house. I put my kiddos in charge of decorating the outside for Halloween. They have tons of fun placing foam headstones and skeletons and hanging spiders from trees. They put pumpkins on the porch and help hang lights with their dad, but I get to decorate the inside.

My favorite fall decorating item is decorating with pumpkins and over the years, I've amassed a fairly large collection of pumpkins. Most of them are ceramic, but I also have grapevine pumpkins, Styrofoam pumpkins, plastic and glass. I didn't set out to collect them, it just happened over time. Mostly, I hit up the clearance sales after Halloween when I can get them for a steal, but sometimes I splurge a little and buy them at the height of the season. Here are just a few of the little vignettes I have around my house using my pumpkins. I hope they'll inspire you.

Here is just a simple arrangement of some rustic pumpkins with glittery branches in a vase with some Dollar Tree ravens. I added some purple mini lights, later after I took this shot so that it could be lit up at night. The night time look was very cool. (Sorry I didn't get a picture of it, but you can use your imagination.:))
 

This arrangement is just inside my entry hallway. You see it when you first walk in my house. I like to vary the heights of the pumpkins and also play up the different sizes and colors and although it looks simple, this display has a lot of texture, height and colors. I like this shot a lot, because the blue vase is kind of unexpected against all the muted browns and oranges. 

I love this wrought iron skeleton. I got this years ago from a Candlelight party. He is so cute and each year I have fun putting him up for display. Here I just placed him with some more rustic looking pumpkins and a Styrofoam headstone and a Grim Reaper statuary I picked up from the Dollar Tree.  I placed a small battery operated flashing light, the ones you buy for pumpkins, just behind the orange pumpkin in the middle so that at night the whole thing flashes with an eerie light. It's a cool effect.

The picture above is the buffet in my dining room and this is one display that has two new pumpkins. The silver one and the red and silver one in the middle are the two I had to buy from Big Lots. This year, Big Lots advertised a glittery line of ceramic and glass pumpkins and they were too pretty to pass up. All those shiny beautiful pumpkins...I had to have them. (Impulse buy? Yes.) Well, I didn't get the one I really wanted because it was $20 and I couldn't justify it. So, I'll wait until they go on clearance and hopefully the $20 mercury glass pumpkin I really wanted, will still be there and I can get it for less. I love the idea of adding sparkle to all my rustic pumpkins. What do you think?

I was playing around with filters and lighting for some of these pics, so forgive me if there are the same pictures but with different lighting. I just couldn't decide which picture I liked better, so I included both. In fact, I have a ton more I'd like to share but I'm leaning toward the side of 'less is more'. :)

I made this skeleton wreath last year after I saw the idea on Pinterest from Dollar Store Crafts. I love this little guy and I think he adds a nice contrast to all the glittery pumpkins, plus he just screams Halloween. Last year, I had him on display on my porch and I only got to see him as I was coming and going. This year, he's inside, front and center in the heart of my home and I get to look at him everyday...he makes me smile. :)
I think I should name him...LOL!

Entertaining Ideas

Here are just a few ideas for entertaining for Halloween. We had our Halloween Dinner Club last weekend and here are some of the things I put together to set a festive mood for our party. 

I played around with a fun idea for marking wine glasses when entertaining for Halloween. I bought a pack of multicolored plastic Halloween rings and looped them around the stems as wine glass charms. Mix up the colors and rings to make your glass unique. The fun begins at night when you turn on a black light and see them glow! Super cute and festive!

Black Bean Hummus

Here, I used two different sizes of plastic margarita glasses from the 99cents Only Store and used them to serve my Black Bean Hummus and Pita chips. The two sizes gives your table some height and interest when entertaining, plus it just plain looks cool. :) I love the 99cents Only Store and at Halloween they have a ton of really inexpensive Halloween decorations and plastic tableware. The creepy cloth and the Styrofoam headstone were also from the 99cents Only Store. I found the small Grim Reaper statue at Dollar Tree along with the small plastic skulls. The glittery pumpkins were bowl filler that I found at Big Lots.  Be creative and mix it up a bit and you'll have a really fun festive table. 

"Beet"ing Hearts Salad with Blood Red Dressing

In the picture above, I bought the skull salad tongs and creepy cloth from 99cents Only Store. The skull was from Target. I had the platter from long ago and I thought the patina on the platter made it look old and spooky, just perfect for a Halloween table. The Salad dressing decanter reminds me of a volumetric flask from chemistry lab and looks great with the Blood Red Dressing to add to the mood.

Here's an idea for setting up your wine bar when you entertain. Grab a bunch of Styrofoam headstones of different sizes and colors and line them up as a background to frame your table and set a festive mood. Most of these I got from the 99cents Only Stores but the big one I got from my neighbor, Lily when she was cleaning out her old decorations. I love hand-me-downs, thank you Lily! Doesn't it look great as the focal point in this setup? :) 

 
I used a plastic cauldron as a wine bucket and had some fun wine bottle labels that I put on the wine bottles. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of this, but at night when it got dark, I threw 2-3 glow sticks into the ice filled cauldron to make it glow with cool color and to light up the inside of the bucket. It was a pretty cool effect.

When I entertain, I like to set the mood and the outside patio table was no exception. Here I made this table scape with all the different small pumpkins I've collected over the years. In this arrangement there are real pumpkins, foam pumpkins, plastic ones, glittery ones and not so glittery ones. Then I added a ton of votive candles and voila! I got these little pumpkin votive candle holders at Michael's on clearance for 25 cents each. Total steal.But the effect is really pretty especially at night. See picture below.

 Here is a picture of my beautiful table scape at night...

Another little fun thing to get when entertaining is to buy some dry ice. Dry ice is carbon dioxide in solid form. When dry ice is at room temperature the solid becomes a gas through a process called sublimation, which is a fancy word to describe when compounds move from a solid to gaseous state without first turning into a liquid.  When carbon dioxide sublimes, it gives off the eerie heavy gas you see below. Dry ice is extremely cold and will burn you if you are not careful but its fun to watch sublime in air and when placed in liquids. (CAUTION: Take extreme care if placing in liquids that you do not ingest the dry ice, it will burn you)
The other photo is a beverage dispenser that my husband filled up with a tasty punch (wink) and placed glow sticks in the dispenser, see the little glow inside the punch? (My husband wanted me to make sure I said that as a safety measure he placed the glow sticks in a small Ziploc bag before placing them in the punch, in case the glow sticks started to leak.)The little test tubes next to it, again were purchased from 99centsOnly Store this last summer. Throw a black light on it and watch it glow.

 
Lastly, this was an idea I had a few year's ago for my oldest son's 6th birthday party. His birthday is October 25th (He turns 8 tomorrow-yay!) and he's always game to have Halloween themed birthday parties. (On the inside, I'm so excited because I love Halloween and I'm happy to dream up fun ideas for the party.) This particular year he also wanted a "Candy Bar" for his party. So I gave it some thought and went out and bought every kind of Halloween candy under the sun. I bought eyeballs, gummy body parts, candy corn, pumpkin suckers and a few packages of the Peeps Halloween Ghosts just to name a few. But I was uncertain at how to include the Marshmallow ghosts in the bar since they were sticky and unwrapped. And then I got this idea when I purchased some glittery branches from Michael's. I wrapped each ghost in small plastic bags (from Michael's in the candy making/cake decorating aisle) and hung marshmallow ghosts on the branches and it served as the centerpiece to the whole candy bar. It was super cute! Anyway, I apologize for the bad pic, it was taken 2 years ago with my old crappy cell phone. But it will give you an idea of what the finished Candy Bar looked like. HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

If you want to see more Halloween Ideas and what's coming up next before I blog it, LIKE  "Castellon's Kitchen" on Facebook. (Click the Facebook link at top of my home page)

Also for some fun Halloween-inspired recipes, click the "Halloween Food" label in the right-hand column of my home page.