Happy Halloween!

If you haven't already figured it out by now, I love Halloween! I never celebrated Halloween as a kid. For one, we lived on a long dirt road with only about 10 homes on it, so it wasn't exactly ideal for trick-or-treaters. We usually spent Halloween at a church event or something similar. One church we attended had a big festival, complete with carnival rides and everything.

But now, I love the opportunity to have my own trick-or-treaters stop by and get some candy. I'm really looking forward to all of the cute, little kids in their fun costumes to come by in the next few hours. I am a little sad because I'm going to have to cut it a little short tonight. It's one of my good friend's birthdays and I really want to get to see her for dinner, but that cuts into trick-or-treatin' time. I'm hoping kids start coming by early enough!

Although I'm not really dressing up tonight (I'll do a little something for the kids), I did go out with my girls over the weekend and we were a trio of witches. However, I'm pretty sure I ended up looking more like a goth kid with a pointy hat than a witch, but oh well.

But whatever you end up doing this year, have a very Happy Halloween! And enjoy lots of candy!

My spooky setup

I've said before how I love any excuse to decorate and rearrange my house. That's part of why I love this time of year. Between fall, Halloween and Christmas, my house gets a brand new look every month!

And of course, decorating for Halloween is one of the most fun. I love fantasy and make-believe and Halloween to me is just another excuse to get to be a kid again. One of these days I want to have one of those crazy, extreme Halloween houses, with lights and smoke and sound effects and graveyards and tons of spider webs and on and on and on. But this may have to be something I do waaay in the future. Mainly because, I don't think we have the ideal house for something like that. While we've only have one Halloween here, from what I remember from last year, we didn't have a whole lot of older kids trick-or-treating. It was mostly the real little ones with their parents who wouldn't really appreciate a big display. Also, our house is on the street that leads up to the main road and we're only a few houses from the end. Even though we had a decent number of kids come by last year, I assume a lot of them probably turn around at the cul de sac down the street. But we'll see what happens in the future, once we have kids and holidays become an even bigger deal than they are now.

For now, I'm happy with my little decorations that I've put up. We've got some cute Halloween decorations outside, including a spider and his giant web and, of course, my little ghosty.

But what I'm really proud of is my Halloween mantle. I gathered lots of ideas from around the internet on Pinterest in order to come up with it.

My cousin and I searched everywhere before finding this fabulous candelabra at T.J. Maxx. That was the one piece I knew I had to have! And I have to admit, I'm pretty proud of my spider display, which I totally just made up and put together myself. Now I have to say, I've never been particularly crafty, but these past couple months I've been obsessed with little craft projects and I'm so pleased with how all of this came out. I even painted the "B" with a homemade crackle solution. Here's a better look at that:

It was my cousin's idea to do the googly "Boo" eyes. I'm very upset that I'm going to have to take everything down after tomorrow. I spent so much time putting together my Halloween display, I have no idea what I'm going to do for my fall mantle, until Christmas. But that's just another reason to redecorate!