How to Turn Christmas Lights into Hauntingly Good Halloween Decor

When Halloween decorations start appearing in your local hardware store in late summer, you know that decorating for the spooky season has become big business. It’s hard to deny the holiday’s appeal as a season of fun and mischief, a celebration that gives creativity free reign.

Halloween decor can take many directions. You can create a charming autumn display with scarecrows, colored corn and dried materials, or focus on the spookier sort of Halloween decorations with ghosts, ghouls and witches. Make your Halloween display eerie or dive into all-out gore.

About three in four Americans purchased Halloween decorations last year – many of them destined for porches and front lawns. From now through the end of October, those giant skeletons, animated witches and inflatable ghosts will virtually fly off the shelves. Some of them may even make their way to your yard.

While you’re putting up all your outdoor Halloween decorations, however, give careful thought to how you’ll light the display. Well-lit Halloween outdoor decor makes its biggest impact after dark. One way you can make a big impact is with colored string lights, commonly termed Christmas lights.

Here are a few creative lighting ideas to make your Christmas lights do double-duty and enhance your Halloween decorating scheme.

When it comes to Halloween lights, color is key. Lights in vivid blue, green and purple seem to make your decorations glow and can add to the unearthly aspect of your display. Red and orange Halloween lights also add a dramatic effect. Use them to mimic a fire under a witch’s cauldron or to light a porch or pumpkin, for instance. You also can place orange lights along fences and porch rails as a backdrop for deeper-toned decorations.

Remember telling ghost stories in the dark with a flashlight placed under your chin for an eerie effect? Creative uplighting may be your new favorite Halloween trick! Create a creepy atmosphere with blue or purple flood lights placed at ground level and aimed upward at your Halloween decorations. Use your flood lights to light up a wide display or emphasize a single spooky feature.

Provide a safe route to your front door (and the treats) with Halloween pathway lights. Halloween-themed pathway markers are popular, but there are other products to light the way. Line the walk with luminaries, hang lanterns from hooks or string lights along the path using light stakes.

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Transform the trees and bushes in your yard with light. Twine Halloween string lights up tree trunks and along branches and arrange net lights over bushes to help set the scene. If you have more than one tree in your yard, consider stringing lights between them to create a canopy overhead. Tuck in a few huge rubber spiders or bats for extra creep factor.

No Halloween display is complete without a Jack o’ lantern or two. Instead of using candles, that can blow out or create a fire hazard, tuck a strand of battery-operated lights into each pumpkin.

Or, tuck a battery-operated candle inside your pumpkin with a bulb that flickers just like candlelight.

The wide variety of Halloween decorations ramps up the fun factor for seasonal decorating – and lights are the defining touch. Exercise your creativity and spread a little light on this year’s Halloween decor.