Non-cheesy Ways to Decorate Your Home This Halloween

As Summer gives way to Fall, the drama of changing seasons becomes more apparent. The air, which was once hot and at times unbearable, now takes on a crisper feel. When the air changes and the season pass, it’s time again for that spooky holiday we call Halloween. 

Part of the fun of Halloween is the opportunity to dress up and look like a different person or creature. Both people and homes get to share in the fun. However, transforming your home from summer themes to Halloween fright can be difficult and overwhelming. There are thousands of decorations to choose from, and some might be, well, too cheesy for your taste! Agh! 

No fear though, you can avoid the decorating blunders associated with cheesy decor by striking a charmingly haunted feel with some slightly sophisticated choices. 

Use Pumpkins, But Not That Way. 

There is a lot of fun to be had carving pumpkins. In fact, this is a Halloween pastime. For the sake of striking a more elevated feel in your home, consider putting the carving tools away. 

Pumpkins of all sizes staged in your home make for good decoration, and there are a few ways to approach this. Classically, people will use smaller pumpkins, squash, and gourds to decorate tables and mantles. These orange, yellow, and brown color hues immediately create the autumn feel and connect your home to the Fall season, while appropriately nodding to Halloween. 

There is another way to use pumpkins that helps modernize your decor through brushes and paint. Painting pumpkins, especially using more clean and modern colors, brings a serious level of sophistication to your decor and your home. Keeping a white and black color scheme allows your home to hint at Halloween without fully committing your home to the orange and brown scheme. The classic oranges of Halloween tend to more easily slip into the “cheesier” side of the holiday. Try adding gold foil to white-painted pumpkins to reach new levels of class as well. 

Incorporate Nature. 

Halloween is connected to nature. The themes of spookiness and darkness tie into the reality happening in the trees and in the air. Finding ways to bring that outside reality into your home is a fun, unique, and non-cheesy way of dressing up your decor. In fact, anytime you can minimize the orange plastic and maximize the nature in your home, you are already winning. 

A few ways to bring the outside inside is through branches and leaves. A leafless branch hung on the wall like a picture or painting, adds a beautiful element of Fall to your home and also captures those themes of decay and darkness. After all, that is part of the celebration of Halloween. 

The same is true for leaves as well. Golden leaves with hues of red and brown make for fantastic colors as they are integrated with other Halloween decor items in your home. A creative way to use leaves is to create a leaf mobile of sorts – as you might see over the crib of a baby. Creating this mobile over your dining room table or in your entranceway brings a three-dimensional aspect to your home, sure to amaze the neighbors.  

Scary Artwork. 

An interesting way to add degrees of “spookiness” into your home is through artwork. Opting to swap out some wall space for Halloween-inspired art will subtly change the feel of your home, helping draw people into the spirit of the season.

Posters of skeletons displayed in a series of embroidery hoops make this doubly interesting and accessible. Another way to avoid cheesiness and to strike the tone of elegance is by displaying your Halloween art in specimen jars. The other-worldliness of the jars will help draw people into the new world you’re creating without looking cheesy.