Married to the Empire

Sunday, October 14, 2007

Putting out the Halloween decor

We're Christians, but we're not anti-Halloween. We don't condone pagan worship or anything, but we certainly don't have a problem with costumes, candy, and fun decorations. We do, however, tend to stick with decorations of God-made creatures, such as cats, spiders, rats, etc.

Ruf got the Halloween decorations out of the attic yesterday, and we put them out this afternoon. Much of it is homemade. Martha Stewart has some of the best Halloween crafts around, in my opinion. Two years ago her magazine had lawn ornaments of cats and a witch. I showed Ruf the cats and begged him to make them for me. He's a sweetie, so he did. We put spotlights behind them, so they're silhouetted at night. Very cool.





Last year's Martha magazine showed a cat mask tied with a ribbon around the face of a pumpkin. The pumpkin is cut to fit the mask's cutouts. I really liked it, so I went to Kinko's to have the mask printed out on the proper paper, then I bought a foam pumpkin at a craft store. Tres cute and easy!



The October 2003 issue of Living had a cool article about spooky porches. There was a how-to for a spider egg sac that was super easy to make. It involves nothing more than white pantyhose, a foam ball, some batting, and a whole bunch of plastic spiders. I need to make the webbing a bit more wispy, but this is how they look after 4 years and just having come out of the box for this year.





I don't do much indoors, but I do have some cute little candle holders. The top of our new TV was an empty canvas for them.



A year or two ago, I bought this cute bucket for our candy. I'm all about cats.



We still need to buy some spiderwebbing to string across the porch. We threw it all away last year because it was nasty after being out in the elements. But we do enjoy decorating with fun stuff for this holiday.

1 comment:

Ann said...

We let the boys go trick-or-treating but they have to wear friendly costumes. It's hard because they see all kinds of scary costumes and it frightens them. Sometimes I wonder if we should go do some other fun family thing...it's hard.

Someone once told me that if we refuse to participate in trick-or-treat by not handing out candy, we might be missing out on an opportunity to witness to someone. That seemed to make sense. I've been thinking of carving their pumpkins to glorify Jesus, maybe with "Jesus is the Light of the World" or something, I don't know, that's kind of a long phrase to carve on a pumpkin or two. Or maybe pass out candy with scripture on it? I'll figure something out :)