How To Build A Collection Of Heirloom Halloween Decor To Last A Lifetime

Halloween

Jun 12

When you’re young and just starting out on your own, you might take any and all halloween decor you can get your hands on. At least, that’s how I was in my first apartment. Back then, I actually wrote for a website called “My First Apartment” where I talked about buying on a budget, and apartment life as a young adult. That website doesn’t exist anymore, but I still remember the feeling of trying to curate my very first home.

For Halloween (and most holidays,) I would do big hauls of dollar store decor. I would buy things on a whim, with no real care about quality or the durability of what I was buying. When the next year came, I would do the same thing - buy more dollar store or low quality items, get bored of them, donate them, and repeat the cycle. I was latching onto any and every trend, which made me believe I needed to buy new Halloween decor every single year.

When you’re in your 20s, you may not know who you are yet, or what your overall decorating style is, and you probably just buy whatever initially draws you in. Now that I’m in my 30s, I only want items that I’m going to keep forever.

It’s ALL ABOUT MAKING MEMORIES

Why do I want a collection of decor to last forever? Because the more you decorate with something, the more it becomes part of your holiday traditions. I want to pull out the same cookie jars every year, and use the same candleholders at dinner. I want my family to know we’re officially in spooky season when those old familiar jack-o-lantern blow molds come out.

When I look at my grandmother’s old holiday decor, it gives me the warmest feeling of nostalgia, and I want to create that feeling in my own home.

Here’s how to build a collection of Halloween decor to last a lifetime:

DECIDE ON AN OVERALL AESTHETIC

This may seem like the hardest part, because how will you know if the style you like now, is a style you’ll like forever? For this, I’m asking you to trust that you know yourself better than you think. When I look back at photos of my old apartment, I can see that I loved classic Halloween decor even then. I’ve always been drawn to traditional orange and black, jack-o-lanterns, witches, ghosts, Frankenstein, etc. I also used to buy cheap look-alikes of vintage Halloween decor. Now, I search for the real thing.

Lucky for me, the easiest aesthetic to curate over years, is classic Halloween. It’s not a passing trend, so there will always be orange, black, green and purple Halloween decorations available in stores. If you find vintage Halloween decor at estate sales, it’s almost always classic Halloween. Inheriting decor from a loved one? It will most likely be classic Halloween.

You also don’t necessarily have to stick with one aesthetic. As long as you’ve got room to store things, there’s nothing wrong with having a couple of different looks to switch between.

Classic Halloween doesn’t have to be just black and orange. Here are some specific, yet timeless themes to choose from. All of these can easily be curated over time, and also be mixed and matched in different parts of your home:

Victorian Halloween (antique portraits, mirrors, dollhouses, ornate frames, candles, etc)
Astrology & Crystals
Haunted Manor
Witches & Black Cats
Ghosts
Horror
Haunted Literature / Dark Academia
Skeletons & Oddities
Botanical (brooms, dried herbs, apothecary bottles, Practical Magic vibes)
Haunted Seaside (old maps, ship lanterns, maritime antiques, foggy seaside paintings, etc)

Declutter

If you’re just starting out, you may not have anything to declutter (which is great - blank slate!) If you’re like me, and have a decade’s worth of holiday decor in your basement, you're going to need to take inventory.

I usually start by bringing everything up from the basement, and going through each tote, one by one. I have a bag ready for items to donate, and fill it up as I go.

Once I do the first sweep, I lay everything out, to get a better idea of what I have. Then, I go through again and decide what else to donate.

This photo is from my 2022 declutter, and I’ve both donated, and accumulated a lot more since then. We also have a seperate tote for camping, as we love to attend Halloween-in-August camping weekends, so I have a certain number of items specifically reserved for that.

Every single time I declutter, I get closer and closer to the heirloom collection of my dreams.

DON’T FALL VICTIM TO PASSING TRENDS

We’ve all done it. When I was in Boston a couple years ago, I ended up buying disco ball spiders from Target because I saw someone do a Halloween Target haul on TikTok that included them. They were pink. Did they match my other Halloween decor? Not at all, and I had no reason to buy them. We don’t have target in Canada, so it was a momentary dopamine hit to find something I couldn’t get at home.

If there is a trend that comes around, and you’ve absolutely decided that it’s your goal to have this aesthetic, just be aware of a few things. First, it’s going to be really hard to find other pink ghost cowboy decor once the trend passes. It’s not easy to build a collection of forever decor on themes that come and go.

Second, you probably won’t find the best quality items with passing trends. When a trend hits, it will be at several stores at once, so you may find some decent things during the initial run. Then, within a couple of years, the trend makes its way to the dollar stores, where you’ll find lower quality items in that theme. Don’t expect to find vintage decor to match these themes, as they likely don’t exist.

TIP: Try choosing a colourway instead of specific trend. If you love pink cowboy ghost decor, maybe what you really love is a pink Halloween aesthetic. It will be a bit easier to find general pink decor each year, than a specific passing theme.

QUALITY OVER QUANTITY

So you’ve recently decluttered and decided that “ghosts” are your favourite items to decorate with. You’re going to be tempted to buy every ghost you see. Instead of loading up your cart at Walmart, Target, and every dollarstore, take a step back and think of what you really want to buy. There is absolutely nothing wrong with shopping at those places (I do) as long as the items you’re buying are decent quality. Remember that you have years to curate this collection. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Allow your collection to evolve naturally, over time.

You want quality items that you don’t have to throw away after a couple of years, because the cardboard warped, or the words peeled off. This is why I love to thrift older items, because if it’s already survived a few decades, you know it’s a quality piece.

MIX OLD AND NEW

The best collections are ones built over time, mixing both old and new. The old could be items you inherited, estate sale or thrift finds, DIYs, or simply something you bought years ago. I love decorating with old books, and The new is going to be sprinklings of things you get sporadically, replacements for used or broken items, or really special pieces you just happen upon. If you’re a collector of certain things, like the Lemax Spooky Town pieces, you’re most likely going to be getting at least 1-2 new ones every year. As long as you’ve got the space for it, that’s totally fine.

STORE YOUR ITEMS PROPERLY

As you curate your collection, you need to make sure you’re storing everything properly. Plastic totes are great, because they can be easily labeled and stacked. For things like a Spooky Town collection, the safest way to store them, is in their original boxes. Books should be stored away from moisture, and with some air flow.

If you have room in your cupboards or china cabinet, those are the best places to store your Halloween dishes. Otherwise, bubble wrapped and in a tote is fine as well. Soft Halloween masks can be stuffed with tissue paper to hold their shape, and candles should be stored away from sunlight, and wrapped in bubble wrap to keep from melting or breaking.

If you’re curating an heirloom Halloween collection, tell us about it in the comments!

Special note: At Merrymake, we don’t believe in using AI for writing blog posts, so all of our posts are 100% written by the author. Yes, we really are just that witty.