Vacuuming in high heels & pearls

I think my favorite part of the house to decorate for each holiday is the top of my china cabinet because it's well out of Maren's reach, meaning I can actually decorate with things I don't want molested or destroyed by curious three-year-old fingers! It also helps that it's a nice large surface. I try to do different things from year to year although I may re-use some elements. This is what I came up with for Halloween 2008:


I kept it a bit more spare than usual and stuck to a mostly black color scheme. Here's a closer view of the left side,

the center,

and the right side.I do love those funny vertebrae candles that I bought last year! I prefer Halloween decor that is a bit spooky and macabre but not too gory, and those fit the bill. The black feathery things in the champagne bucket are not actual feathers; they are black and glittery and plastic but oh so cool! They have wires in them so they can be shaped, and I love how they look with the dried Spanish moss spilling over the top of the bucket.

(Side note: I lived in Savannah for a couple of years, where Spanish moss grows naturally in the beautiful old oaks and adds to the charm of the landscape. What you may not know is that stuff is positively CRAWLING with chiggers! You are never supposed to touch it or pull it down. We heard tales of tourists who found that out the hard [read: itchy] way when they took some moss home as a souvenir!)

One of my favorite elements of my display is my crow. He is helpfully identified by the vintage flashcard stuck in an old flower frog. :)

Just a few more days until Halloween, yet I still have more decorations to share with you. I may go a bit overboard with the decorating, but it sure makes it easy to find blog topics in October! :)