8 Ways to Decorate Your Porch for Halloween

Trick-or-treaters enjoy the splendor of Halloween and all its trappings. Decorating your front porch for them makes the experience of trick-or-treating fun. Imagine approaching a dark house overtaken by spider webs and ghosts, wondering who or what is going to answer when you knock on the door. That wonderful suspense is created by the props you use to decorate your front porch. Your props don't have to be expensive. They just have to be creative! Every Halloween I have managed to decorate my front porch and yard inexpensively. Some of the materials I needed were already lying around the house. Others were available at retail stores at low prices. Here are 8 decorations that I think are the quintessential Halloween props along with my tips to make them all your own.

Pumpkins. Real pumpkins are inexpensive and come in different sizes. You can spread them out on your porch and place one or two toothy jack-o-lanterns where they are sure to be seen. Get creative with your jack-o-lantern patterns. Cut silhouettes of bats or witches into them. You could even just chisel the letters that spell BOO.

Ghosts. Ghosts are easy to make from materials you may already have in your home. Choose a white or off-white fabric and place either a rolled up t-shirt or polyester batting into the center of the fabric. Then pull the fabric tight until you can wrap string or rubberband around the neck. Use a permanent marker to draw on three circles-two for the eyes and one for the mouth. Hang these from the ceiling of your porch or nearby trees. For extra eerieness use sheer fabrics.

Lights. Hang lights in orange or purple along the trim of your porch or on nearby greenery. Use paperbags with tealights settled into sand for inexpensive luminaries. Make candles your primary source of light. The darker the house the spookier.

Witches. You can use inexpensive construction paper to add witches to your porch design. Cut out silhouettes of witches on dark construction paper and tape them to the inside of your windows or dangle them from your porch ceiling. You could also paste them to white posterboard and pin those to your porch walls.

Spiders. You can make a giant spider your focal point if you are ambitious. Decorate one of your porch walls with clothing line string in the shape of a spider web. If you don't want to create nail holes, hang a large piece of cloth or wood and attach the string to it. Buy a large spider to sit atop the huge web you just wove for it. A spider that size is definitely going to stir up phobias! Don't forget to add the standard faux spider webs that are usually less than ten dollars. They come in white, purple, and glow-in-the dark. Spider webs in all the corners make the house look abandoned and even scarier.

Bats. A phobia of bats is very common. The most inexpensive way to make bat props is to use construction paper in the same way the witches are made. However, for heaviness of texture, I like to cut silhouettes of bats out of black felt and hang them from the porch ceiling. These will look especially spooky if the wind is slightly blowing.

Skeletons. Large skeletons can be very expensive. If you have the talent, make a paper mache skull, two hands, and two feet. They don't have to be works of art. Just make them in the general shapes and use a marker to draw details. Get a shirt and pants. Set the skull atop the collar of the shirt, the hands coming out of the sleeves, and the feet coming out of the pants legs. Hang this ghastly ensemble from the ceiling of the porch with a clothes hanger or situate it upright in a chair. Don't worry about stuffing the clothes to make them seem bulkier. After all, it is a skeleton!

Tombstones. Tombstones can be made out of several inexpensive materials like posterboard, construction paper, foam, or rectangular pieces of wood. You can use paints or chalks to write the epitaphs on them. Be creative. Write your name or think of comical names.