Host: Most of us love to get into the spirit and have a festive Halloween but with the cost of decorations, costumes and all those treats, we tend to scare our wallets more than our guests. It’s time take control of your money. Nina Spezzaferro editor of celebrations.com is here with us to show some creative ways to help us enjoy a budget friendly Halloween. Hello.
Nina: Hi.
Host: And you have all of these beautiful things laid out today and we’re talking about staying on budget. I think it’s very hard when you’re talking about planning a party.
Nina: Exactly. As you said you want to scare your guests, not your wallet. So what I’ve done here is I brought you some of the best ideas from celebrations.com and they’re all budget friendly. So what I recommend doing for Halloween is throwing a haunted house party. Because all you have to do is purchase some accessories, add those to the décor that you already have in your home.
Host: So what are we talking today—let’s show some of the decorations you’re actually talking about and how easy they are?
Nina: One easy thing to do is purchase cobwebs. You can purchase them in bulk, they’re very inexpensive and you can add them to things like pictureframes, mirrors and so on all throughout your home. And then you can embellish them with little spiders like that. Another thing that I like to do is just scatter little creepy crawler treats in unexpected places like these spiders and the mice and then another really cool thing is to sneak them into bowls of candy and that will really freak out your guests.
Host: So where your guests don’t expect it.
Nina: Another décor item that I like to focus on because it’s free really is your lighting. So what you want to do is dim your lights and if you’ve overhead lights, you can replace your overhead lights with black lights.
Host: Very easy to do.
Nina: And then another thing I love is tea lights. I purchased 100 for just $5.00. And you don’t even need tealight holders because if you’re like me, you have a lot of mismatched glassware at times, so you just use wine glasses, martini glasses and then to make these a little bit gory I just took a tube of fake blood and my own fingertips and I added these right here.
Host: Now, let’s get to the main thing, the food.
Nina: The food, it’s got to be gory right and you can do it inexpensively so here, you see it’s a Halloween classic putting gummy worms in cookie dirt and I’m serving these on hard covered books which keeps with the haunted house theme. You can do leather bound books if you have those and it’ll add levels to your buffet and then guests can simply serve themselves.
Host: I love that they’re in these glasses as well, it’s a great idea.
Nina: Yes, I wanted to just serve them in a unique sophisticated way. So you can do them in wine glasses or martini glasses.
Host: What next?
Nina: So we have another Halloween classic, witch finger cookies. I did them in green and you can also have fun with the food coloring, paint them red and so on.
Host: And little almonds at the top for the fingernails. Great idea.
Nina: Exactly. And this is just served in simple three tier stand I had. You don’t have to purchase expensive partyware. You can just add little touches to what you already have so I serve them in crushed cookie dirt and then on top here, I have some meringue cookie bones. Meringue cookies are really inexpensive. The base ingredients are just egg whites and sugar.
Host: So you can’t even mess those up. What do we have over here? These are hardboiled eggs.
Nina: Yes, these are hardboiled egg eyeballs. Hardboiled eggs are really inexpensive to make. It’s just eggs and a little bit of mayo and in this case, some food coloring.
Host: How easy. I love that. Hardboiled eggs right there and of course, drinks. That’s a big one for parties.
Nina: It’s not a party without a signature cocktail so what I’ve done is bloody marys and I always cheat a bloody mary recipe. Nobody ever notices, it’s just tomato juice or even a blood mary mix with some vodka and then those are embellished with carved radish eyeballs.
Host: And olives in there I see. Thank you so much, Nina.
Nina: Thank you.
Host: Great ideas. Of course for other great Halloween decorating and entertainment tips that will scare your guests and not your wallet, go to our website bettertv.com and click on the link.