Blog Edition | Frighteningly Chic on a Budget

How to Decorate for Halloween on a Dime

From the October 2024 issue of 517 Magazine, here are my tips for decorating your home with your own personal flair:

I love to decorate for holidays, but I am not one to fill my yard with inflatables or spend a fortune on lights because I like to do something different every year. However, that can become just as expensive over time and feels wasteful. My fickle eye has also been known to throw out a concept after I’ve spent an entire weekend decorating because it just doesn’t speak to me, so I am always looking for ways to repurpose and reuse core items and add a few key pieces that get me that perfect blend of timeless and trendy. Halloween is one of my favorite occasions to make an impact so I get excited when stores roll out their creepiest decor and tempt me with all the black and/or weathered items my goth-and-vintage-loving-heart desires. This year, I decided to challenge myself with creating a beautifully horrifying mantle display using items I have, found, or got at the dollar store.

I must confess that my local dollar store is a Dollar Tree Plus that has an aisle of items that cost a little more than the usual $1.25 so I limited myself to one $5 item – which was definitely worth it for the “ew” factor it delivers – but most of what I bought was $1.25 or $3.

My first stop was the Free, Cheap, and Antique store. There, in the FREE section, I found tons of hard-cover books. Always on the lookout for antiques with interesting titles, I couldn’t resist going through every one one of them. I soon noticed a theme among many of them, and I was immediately inspired. I grabbed “Beowulf,” “Assassins,” “My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding,” “Desecration,” and “Fatal Passion” before anyone else stole my idea. It just so happened that each of these titles featured a beautiful black hard cover under their dust jackets.

With my free books, I headed to the Dollar Tree in DeWitt. I found candle holders, candles, black flowers, assorted bones, mystical sculptures, spiders, a spiderweb table runner, and a haunted-looking lenticular graphic in a Victorian-styled frame. 

I reused the mirrors and an empty vintage frame from the last season and added all of my ghoulish finds. The end result is, by far, one of my favorite Halloween displays … and I am so proud of the fact that the cost wouldn’t make anyone scream.

Here is a list of items inspired by this collection that can be purchased online.