Halloween

Braeden's Gingerbread House Guest

I usually have an annual Christmas Gingerbread House Party where quite a few girls come of over to decorate gingerbread houses with a plethora of candy.  (My girlfriend Stacy even did a University of Oregan house with little, yellow candy ducks.  It was really sweet!)

So this year I decided to change things up a bit and have a Halloween Gingerbread House party.  This past summer at the Atlanta Gift Show, my mom and I found a really cool new "thing" -- The Candy Cottage.  Basically, a big, plastic, gingerbread-like house that you decorate, scrape, wash, store away until the next holiday and then do it all over again.  The best -- my kitchen doesn't get crazy messy for days baking gingerbread that may or may not stay together when decorated by two elementary-age boys.  We girls has a great time decorating the houses on a Friday with a few bottles of wine and a lot of chocolate.  My boys had an even better time the next morning.

The Candy Cottage is just of the really cool items we will have at our upcoming Holiday Open House (Nov. 25-26 & Dec. 2-3).  It is a really cool way to create a family tradition without the fuss of cooking, cutting and gluing gingergread.  

So this upcoming weekend is ANOTHER one of our favorite family traditions -- the annual Singer Pumpkin Carving Party.  You know your party is a hit when you hear little friends ask you children to be invited to the party this year!  (Thank you William!)   We have a house full of kiddos, pumpkins, some parents and a bit of spiked cider, and a whole lot of fun!  One of the most creative decorating items I have this year are the green aquadots I put in my kitchen centerpiece (pictured above).  I had to search and finally found the aquadots at JoAnn Fabric.   I filled the bottom of the vace with the aquadots and added the water.  As they began to expand and fill with water (about an hour or so later), I added the ping-pong ball eyes and a few cockroaches.  The kids get so freaked out when the come to wash their hands in the sink!  It takes the aquadots about an hour to completely fill, so make sure to give it enough time and not over fill the vace (like I did the first time).  You'll end up with green balls all over the floor -- those slippery suckers are a bit hard to catch!

The top vace is filled with flowers and candy corn (yes, I do reuse the candy corn, so don't eat it if you come to our home).  It really makes for a very festive centerpiece, which I change with every season and holiday.

My favorite Halloween decor in the kitchen are the two crows I have perched on my Crate and Barrel fruits.  Easy cheesy...the fruit is always in the center of my huge island, so I just "perched" the crows into the apple and pear with the wire that was already on their feet.  (You can find these crows on Oriental Trading.com.) 

The vaces are filled with white, green & black beans.  I placed a second, smaller vace inside the bigger one before filling the vace.  This gives me a place to put the water and flowers without ruining the beans.  I simply went to my garden and used zinnas, corn stalks and rasberry leaves to fill the vaces -- really festive and unusual!

Whatever decorating style you use for your Halloween events, look around to see what you already have in your house and yard -- you'll be so surprised!

       
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I LOVE Halloween!  This is the day when creativity has no limits - any style, any taste, any colors, any thing.  There are no rules when it comes to decorating for Halloween!

So this year, I have tried to dig for my favorite decor items in celebrating the one time a year when I can put away my pearls and really be a witch!

My kitchen is the heart of our home.  It is very large and always ends up being the center of our ranch-style life, no matter what.  Whether we have guests or spend the day in our favorite, college sweats.  Our days start and end in this heart of a space, so this was where I really focused a great deal of attention in decorating this special holiday.

My personal Halloween style changes every year (this is why I love the holiday).  This year, I am more in a black-white-grey mood.  I started with a few labels on my usual pasta-flour-popcorn jars.  I used photoshop to create the labels once I found the perfect shapes on one of my favorite blogs, The Graphic Fairy.  Karen (a.k.a., the Graphic Fairy) has the most amazing clip-art images!  I found a few that were perfect and added my own text to two of the three. 


 Once I printed and cut out the labels on a slightly grey paper, I attached them to a 2.5" wide black ribbon that I purchased at Hobby Lobby (at 50% off, of course).  I simply cut an additional 8" that I left in the container, replaced the lid, and "voila", the Halloween apothacary shop is open!

Here are a few pics of the end product.

Now, on to the Haunted Gingerbread House decorating!