A Halloween You Keep: Plastic Free Halloween Decorations, Room by Room

Most Halloween decorating comes home in a carrier bag in the second week of October and leaves in a bin bag in the first week of November. There's another way to do it, and it's a good deal less effort. Own a few proper things and get them back out next year.

These are plastic free Halloween decorations for grown-ups, or as near to plastic free as a normal household gets, one surface at a time. Some of it costs more, and a good half of it shouldn't be bought from anybody, us included.

If you'd like the background first, our guide to what Samhain is and how it turned into Halloween explains why this was a night of bonfires long before it was a night of polyester cobweb.

The two kinds of Halloween

The first kind is the supermarket aisle. Stretchy cobweb, a string of plastic bats, a foam gravestone. It's cheap and cheerful, and nearly all of it is made to last about three weeks.

The second kind is a house that looks like autumn got in. Real candles in real holders. A pumpkin you're going to eat. Branches in a jug. A few dark, well-made things you like enough to leave out until Christmas pushes them off the shelf.

Nobody is a bad person for owning a plastic skeleton. What matters is what you buy next. If you already have one, the greenest thing you can do is keep using it for the next twenty years.

Those figures are a few years old and the pumpkin one moves every autumn, but the shape of it hasn't changed.

The honest bit about cost

Some of this is dearer. A cast candle holder costs more than a bag of plastic ones, and a box of proper taper candles costs more than battery tealights.

Work the cost out per year instead of per October. Something you buy once and bring out for ten Halloweens has cost you a tenth of its price each time. The cheap thing you replace every autumn costs you full price every autumn, for ever.

Work the cost out per year instead of per October.

There's a second saving as well. The best Halloween things are hardly Halloween things at all. A black candlestick or a raven mug doesn't have to go back in the loft on the 1st of November, and neither does a moth lamp. Leave it out all year and you can stop calling it seasonal spending.

And you don't need much. Three good things on a mantelpiece beat thirty forgettable ones. Buy one piece a year if that's what the budget allows.

Swap this for that

Six swaps cover most of it.

The doorstep

The doorstep is where Halloween meets the weather, so it wants heavy, natural things that are happy to get rained on.

Pumpkins and squashes, obviously, and more than one if you can. A few in different sizes look deliberate where a single orange one looks like a leftover. Keep them whole until the last day or two. An uncarved pumpkin sits on a cold step for weeks. A carved one sags within days.

Add a pot of heather or some cut ivy, and a lantern with a real candle inside glass. All of that goes back in the cupboard or on the compost heap afterwards.

The hallway

The hallway is the first thing trick-or-treaters see, and it's usually the darkest room in the house. Use that. Turn the big light off and let one low light do the work.

This is the one place where we wouldn't use a flame at all. It's a narrow space full of coats, children and costumes, with a door opening onto the wind. A small lamp is the right answer, and a good one stays useful all year. The etched glass LED lamps in Lamps and Lights run on batteries too, but it's one lamp you keep for years in place of a bag of tealights you bin, and the glow is soft and patterned.

Then one thing on the wall. A dark mirror doubles whatever light you have, and a woven hanging or a framed print does more for a hallway than any plastic banner. Have a look through Gothic Homeware and Print and Wall Art for the sort of piece that will still be up in the spring.

The mantelpiece, in layers

If you only decorate one surface, make it this one. A sideboard or the top of a bookcase works the same way. The trick is to build it in layers. Line everything up in a row and it looks like a shop shelf.

1. Clear it completely. Everything off, including the things that live there.
2. Start with height. Something tall at one end or both: candlesticks, a jug of branches, a mirror leant against the wall. Uneven is better than symmetrical.
3. Add the light. Candles at three different heights. Tapers up high, a pillar or a jar candle in the middle, tealights in holders down low.
4. Add texture. Dark cloth or lace along the shelf, old books laid flat to stand things on, something in metal or glass to catch the light.
5. Add something natural, last. Small squashes, dried orange slices, conkers, beech leaves, seed heads, bare twigs. This is the layer that makes it autumn, and it costs nothing.
6. Take two things away. Almost every mantelpiece is better with less on it. Step back, squint, and remove whatever you notice first.

For the height and the light, a proper holder is the one purchase we'd put first. The black candlesticks and holders in Gothic Homeware will outlive every candle you ever put in them. Homeware lines come and go, so the collection shows what's in at the moment.

For the candles themselves, have a browse of the wider Candles collection. The Vampire Blood taper candles are black and drip red as they burn, which is as theatrical as a mantelpiece gets. Stand them on something you don't mind getting wax on. Lower down, a few pumpkin shaped candles in soy wax do the job that plastic pumpkins usually do.

• Candle holders in Gothic Homeware The height. Buy once, keep for good. Have a browse
• Vampire Blood Taper Candles The light. Black tapers that drip red. See the tapers
• Large Pumpkin Shaped Candles The low layer, in soy wax instead of plastic. See the pumpkin candles

Colour matters more than quantity. Black, deep red, orange and cream are all you need, and plain spell and ritual candles are a cheap way to get a lot of small flames in exactly those colours. The same candles will do for marking the 31st itself, and our guide to a simple Samhain evening at home shows how.

The table for a Halloween supper

A Halloween supper is a fine use of the evening, even if it's only the household and a pan of soup. The table wants the same approach as the mantelpiece, only lower, because people need to see each other over it.

Start with a dark cloth. A printed altar cloth laid as a centre square over your usual tablecloth works well, and it goes back to being an altar cloth the rest of the year.

Down the middle, run a line of low things. Small squashes, apples, nuts in their shells, and candles in jars. Tall tapers get knocked when people reach for the bread. Use your own plates and glasses. If you want one treat, a gothic mug or a pair of glasses from the homeware collection is a better souvenir of the night than a pack of paper cups, and a set of coasters will save the table from the candles.

The smell of the room counts too

A ceramic burner and a handful of wax melts will scent a whole downstairs. The white pumpkin wax melt burner is a keeper, because only the melts ever need replacing.

If you prefer smoke to wax, there's plenty in Incense, Smudge and Cleansing, and a decent holder from Incense and Burners is another thing you only buy once. Light it before people arrive, so the food still smells like food.

The windowsill and the bookshelf

The windowsill is the bit of your house that the street sees, and a single light in a dark window is one of the oldest decorations there is.

Curtains and candles are a bad combination, so a windowsill is the place for a candle inside something, such as a lantern, a deep jar or a glass holder. A jar candle like the Evergreen amber glass candle glows nicely through the glass and smells of evergreens. If the curtains are close or the sill is narrow, use a lamp instead.

The bookshelf is the easiest surface of the lot, because the job is mostly rearranging what's already there. Turn a few spines inwards so the pages show. Lay a short stack flat and stand something on top. Then add a couple of dark objects among the books and stop.

• Green Witch Book Storage Box Looks like a spell book, hides the matches and tealights. See the storage box
• Large Book of Shadows, Black The real thing instead of a plastic prop. You can write in it. See the journal
• Lamps and Lights For the shelf or sill where a flame would be daft. Have a browse

A leather-bound book is the best prop there is for a shelf, because it is not a prop. Nearly everything in Journals and Grimoires is a real notebook, so the thing that looks like a spell book in October is your garden diary by January.

Every autumn we also put the seasonal bits from across the shop in one place, the Samhain and Halloween collection.

What to find, not buy

We're a shop, and we'd like you to buy your candles from us. But a good half of a Halloween you keep should not come from any shop at all.

Second-hand

Brass candlesticks, old mirrors, picture frames, glass bottles and jars, lace, velvet, hardback books with worn spines.

Foraged

Fallen leaves, conkers, acorns, pine cones, seed heads, windfall twigs, ivy from your own garden.

From the kitchen

Pumpkins and squashes, apples, nuts in shells, oranges for drying, cinnamon sticks, bay leaves.

Worth buying new

Candles, because they get used up. A good lamp. Scent. And the one or two odd, dark pieces that a charity shop will never turn up.

Charity shops and car boot sales are full of brass and glass that nobody wants in July. Do not polish a tarnished candlestick. You'd be rubbing off the best bit.

When you forage, take what has already fallen, take a little, and leave nature reserves and other people's hedges alone. Give everything a shake outdoors before it comes in, unless you want to rehome some spiders.

Putting it away so it survives

Decorations rarely wear out. They get broken in the loft, which is why the putting away is worth ten minutes in November.

• One box, labelled. A single sturdy lidded box marked "Halloween" is better than things tucked into six cupboards.
• Candles somewhere cool. Wax warps in heat, and a loft in summer gets very hot. Store tapers flat, wrapped in tissue or a tea towel, in a cupboard indoors.
• Clean the holders first. Pop holders in the freezer for an hour and old wax usually lifts off in one piece. Never take a knife to resin or painted pieces.
• Wrap glass and resin in cloth. The dark tablecloth and the lace are your packing material.
• Compost the natural layer. Leaves, twigs and tired squashes go on the heap. Keep the dried oranges and the cones if they're still sound.
• Put a note in the box. What you ran out of, and what you'd do differently next time.

Then ask whether the candlesticks, the lamp, the mirror and the mugs need to go away at all. Probably not.

Questions people ask