Halloween Tradition

End of An Era

So for about 4 or 5 years now I have had a halloween party out at my parents house in the country. It was the perfect venue, secluded with enough room for many people, also no neighbors for days. This year is bitter-sweet. For one Danny wont be here, and its one of his favorite holidays, and for two its the last year we are going to have a party out at my parents. Hence they are moving and we are forced to find another location next year or something else to occupy our time on halloween.

With that being said I am still pretty excited, I love planning the party, shopping for ideas and decorating the house. Its so thrilling and fun to come up with cheap, fun decoration ideas to make the house look spooky. On the other hand its not gonna be the same without Danny here.

5 Ways to Reduce Cost of a Halloween Party

1. Thrift shop costume ideas

So unless you are one who needs the "gotta have" Halloween costume from leg avenue each year, this is an easy way to consider saving money for Halloween. Decide what you want to be for Halloween and before you buy the first store bought costume that you see make sure and check out the thrift stores, Ross, consignment shops and any other cheap clothing spot to see if there is anything there that you can use for a costume base, or to make into a costume.

My "wedding dress" from last year was $15 from Ross, the veil was an old tiara I had at the house which I glued the fabric onto.

2. Spider webs
Whether your going for the cutesy kid friendly decorations or more hard core spooky ones I can stress how important (and thrifty) spider webs are to the whole operation. We tend to multiple bags each year (it is a big house) and decorate the inside and outside with spider webs. Using tacs you can actually get very good at stretching them out to last longer too.

3. Internet browse for decoration Ideas
So for our first Halloween party my friend and I searched the internet for cool decorations on a budget. There's a lot of useful information out there, you just have to go find it.

Once example and we found that highlighter fluid glows in the black lights, so we ended up getting those dollar "potion" looking bottles from Michael's crafts and filled them up with water and couple drops of highlighter fluid, each with a different color... the (yellow and green worked the best) to make it look like a mad scientists corner, just hang a black light near by and vuala!

4. Dollar store deals
So I admit most of the stuff at the dollar store is really corny and completely cheesy if your not going for a kiddie party, but it never hurts to look. There are usually some cool buckets that you can use for various things around the house, and sometimes you get lucky and find some old netting type decorations which work well to cover outside tables and things.

5. Get creative!
Many of the things that we usually do to add finishing touches to our party are basically free, or very low budget. In the hallway we would stash a cd, which we had burned full of creepy sounds and noises, just put it on repeat and hide the cd player. Also one years we cut up some old sheets that I had lying around and threw fake blood all over them and hung them out on the clothing line out in back.

My best wishes to all of you! Hopefully this helps give you something to start with.

Do you have any ideas??