Ghoulish Home Decorating Ideas for Halloween

Halloween ­ a holiday that is celebrated around the world by children of all ages -­ even adults. Halloween fanatics start costume planning months before the big day. But why stop at there? AP9 HomeWorksPlus, a leading membership discount program offered by Adaptive Marketing LLC, has conjured up a few haunting home decorating ideas that will help members astound party-monsters and trick-or-treaters alike.

• Make your own graveyard with headstones fashioned out of styrofoam boards or cardboard. Paint them gray, and write your own epitaphs — “The Curse of the Mommy,” “8-track Tapes,” “Last Year’s Trick-or-Treaters,” or whatever tickles your funny bone. Create a ghostly fog effect by placing a container of dry ice behind a headstone, and embellish the cemetery with play spiders and manmade webs.
• Make your jack-o’-lanterns come to life by adding a body. Fill plastic trash bags with newspaper, then dress the bags in old clothes. You can also carve several pumpkins and scatter them around the yard, on top of headstones or rocks and of course, on the front porch.
• Hang Halloween lights around your front door into your party room, then use colored light bulbs to cast an eerie cloud over your guests. A black light can generate a ghostly beam, especially with a flicker switch, and strategically placed candles are ideal lighting for ghastly props and other party pranks.
• Grisly looking chow can add a merrily macabre tone. In the right light, a big bowl of spaghetti and meat sauce can be played off as blood and guts, and a jar of peeled green grapes can easily take on the appearance of a collection of eyeballs. And serving red wine or adding (non-toxic) red dye to the punch can satisfy the hunger of any vampire on the block.
• As a finishing touch, decorate your foyers with spine-chilling props: glow-in-the-dark skeletons; cobwebs lined with spiders; construction-paper bats suspended by fishing line; window decals of witches, goblins, black cats and other ghostly images; corpses that pop out to welcome guests when they open doors; rooms engulfed in dry-ice fog; and toothy-grinned jack-o’-lanterns.

The only restrictions to your Halloween decorations are those you force upon yourself, which might depend on the age range of your ghosts, er, guests. As AP9 HomeWorks Plus members know, you can get bewitching good savings on home decor, home entertainment and much more through the program. Have a howling good time, concludes AP9 HomeWorksPlus.