Maria asked for a Halloween sleepover last October with four friends, and I said yes before I had any plan for what that actually meant. Six hours with five children aged ten and eleven, sugar, darkness, and the expectation that…
Most Halloween front porches look the same. A couple of pumpkins by the door, a fake cobweb stretched across the railing, and an inflatable something that loses air by the second week of October. Perfectly fine. Nobody is going to…
Halloween fog that drifts low across a graveyard or front yard and actually stays there is one of the most atmospheric things you can do to a space for October. It photographs beautifully, it makes trick-or-treaters stop at the gate,…
I grew up convinced that Christmas only counted if there was a fireplace. The stockings hanging from the mantel, the garland draped just so, the glow of candles reflected in the brick. We did not have one growing up. We…
There is a specific smell that hits you in December and makes everything feel like Christmas. It is not one thing. It is orange peel and cinnamon and something resinous underneath, pine maybe, or cedar. It is the smell of…
Every year on October 31st I tell myself I am going to do something special for breakfast. And every year it is 7am, Marina is already in her witch costume, Maria is asking where her hat is, Tasos is looking…
Paper is the most underrated Halloween craft supply in existence. A pack of black and orange construction paper costs less than two euros, lasts the whole season, and somehow produces decorations that end up staying on the walls long after…
Every year around mid-September I find myself staring at the collection of empty toilet paper rolls I’ve been saving in the cupboard under the sink and thinking: right, now what. This year I actually did something with them. Eighteen things,…
There is a specific kind of Halloween decoration that looks like it belongs in a house where someone actually cares about October rather than just going through the motions. The hanging ghost is one of them. Not the plastic ones…
A tray is the easiest thing in decorating and somehow also the most underrated. You put things on a tray and they become a vignette. You put the same things on a surface without a tray and they look like…
