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Let your Christmas decorations do double-duty this holiday season by using them for your Halloween decorations!
We have a lot of Christmas decorations in our family. Christmas is the holiday that we “overdo it” on decor, if that’s possible. 😉
But my daughter also really loves Halloween. She wanted to decorate more this year, and I needed to come up with some ways to make it happen. Walking through the stores, it was tempting to buy some of the neat decorations for sale there, but I knew that it was unnecessary spending for us, and we needed to stick to our budget. I needed to come up with better, cheaper options.
Besides, our budgeted holiday cash was for candy!
So, when it came time to decorate for this spooky fun holiday, I looked to my existing stash of Christmas decorations for some inspiration- and I came up with some budget-friendly decorating ideas.
Our home is now more decked out for our neighborhood trick-or-treating than ever before!
And you can do this too! You probably already have most of these staple decorating Christmas items available to use, just hanging out in boxes in your garage. Get your creative juices flowing and take a look at the ideas here.
Without further ado, here’s the list of Christmas decorations that I re-purposed for Halloween.
Strands of white Christmas lights
Do you have any strands of white Christmas lights? Oh boy, do we. If you do too, then you totally have free Halloween decorating power. Using our white Christmas lights, we spookify our entryway with ghosts for FREE!
All you need are some empty milk jugs (rinsed), a black sharpie, scissors, some rocks/gravel, and white Christmas lights: Voila! Ghost Lanterns.
Bonus: These keep our trick-or-treaters safe by lighting the steps to our front door.
I’ve seen neat ideas using Christmas lights to light up jack-o-lanterns too.
Wreaths
If you’ve got a green wreath for Christmas, just add some spider webbing and spiders to give it that Halloween vibe before hanging it on your front door. You can get a bag of spider webbing (with a few spiders) for $1 at Five Below. One bag goes a long, long way.
Ornaments
Green, white, and silver round ornaments, or icicle ornaments: These look great on any trees you may have in your front yard. Just sprinkle them about in the dead branches. Or, if you have evergreen trees, you could even make the ornaments look like a face using red and white ornaments for angry glowing eyes. Add some more of that spider webbing and you’ve got a nightmare before Christmas.
Greenery
Any Christmas greenery can transform into Halloween decor. Just add spider webbing. You may be noticing a method to my madness. Spider webbing is so cheap and easy to add to any decorations. With that, I think it’s time for a frugal rule of thumb, Halloween style.
Frugal Rule of Thumb: Transform anything into Halloween decor by adding spider webbing.Â
This Christmas greenery idea was borne from the need to do something with my empty tall planters on our front porch. I had to bring in our ferns because of an early first frost, so I had two empty tall planters. That wouldn’t do. Better option? Grab a couple old tomato plant cages, get out the Christmas greenery, wrap the cages, and make mini evergreens. Then cover with spider webs. Spooktacular!
This will also be really easy to transform back into Christmas decor when it’s time.
Christmas acrylic paint supplies
Specifically the red, green, black, and white paint that I bought last year for painting Christmas ornaments. These colors are also very handy for painting pumpkins! My daughter made some really cool witch pumpkins with just these paints and sharpies. This was nearly mess-free compared to carving our pumpkins and will allow them to last longer before they start to rot… However, I’ll be carving ours too–just after the holiday this year. I make roasted pumpkin seeds for snacking and we set up the jack-o-lantern in our backyard as a bird feeder.
As you can see, there are plenty of ways to use the Christmas decorations that you already own as fun Halloween decor.
Added bonus: You’ll be on your way to having your Christmas decorations up early, and without having to pack things back up and pull other boxes out, yada yada.
Using Christmas for Halloween is a money and decorating time saver!
What do you think of these ideas? Have some others? Please share with us in the comments!
