Celebrate Halloween with Lights

Have you noticed more houses outlined in orange lights this year? More ghosts swaying from the trees and more covens of witches gathered around lit up cauldrons?

Popularity of Halloween decorating is on the rise and has been for years. Halloween follows only Christmas, and, according to retailers, every year more families are decorating their houses for Halloween.

Confirm this by checking out what Halloween retailers have to say about this trend.

Light it up. Whether you are going for the laugh, for a sophisticated autumn theme, or for full-on horror, you can make your Halloween decor stand out by just adding a few strands of inexpensive craft lights here, a couple of net lights there and a few strings of mini lights will make your decorations twinkle a little brighter.

Halloween Lights Colors

Orange is the obvious and popular color for Halloween. Orange evokes harvest, pumpkins, and the falling leaves. Orange lights are by far our biggest sellers for Halloween.

As a technical note, “Amber” is the commercial term for orange lights, we call our incandescent mini lights orange but they are this traditional amber color. We decided to call them orange because some folks expected a more caramel color and we want to make sure our customers know what to expect.

More and more, we are also selling green and purple lights for Halloween. All of the secondary colors are popular, and purple and green can make your decorations stand out from the crowd.

For customers focusing more on autumn decorations, yellow makes an appearance as well. Yellow and orange lights mix nicely with the gourds leaves and hay bales that start making an appearance at the first nip of cool Autumn weather.

If you've worked with purple Christmas lights before then you know that incandescent purple bulbs throw a good deal of pink. Mixing them with orange warms them up a bit. We've noticed that our purple LED Bulbs are closer to a true purple.

To save money, you can re-purpose clear or white Christmas lights. It’s easy to change the color of clear lights by putting them under transparent colored fabrics. This creates a muted effect on the front of the house, in a garage, or in your private haunted house.

Get crafty. Use craft and battery lights to tuck some light into a ceramic pumpkin, highlight a wreath or light up a golden hurricane.  It's easy to highlight decorations in your entryway, a jack-o-lantern or a table centerpiece if you don't have to worry about a plug.  Jump on the bandwagon and decorate a glass block with a spooky face and highlight it with a set of white lights.

Halloween Home Decorating

Consider the feel you are trying to create with your Halloween decorations. Are you just throwing up a few lights to let the neighborhood kids know you are open for Trick and Treat? Are you decorating the local haunted house? Or do you just want a few spooky lights for a dinner party? Start your decorating with your purpose, then work toward the lights from there.

Outdoor Halloween Decorations Checklist

Use this list as a guide to make sure you have your bases covered.

Light the pumpkin. Battery powered lights give you a safe way to light your pumpkin. Use a few lights inside to light a traditional carved pumpkin, or make a feature of a whole string of lights by drilling holes and poking the lights out from the center.

Keep it simple with a Halloween wreath. Just dust off your Christmas wreath and add black bats and orange lights for a quick fix. If you want a simple autumn wreath, you can get a wreath frame at a craft store, cover it in burlap, and add an accent bow with battery fairy lights. Or create a spider’s web of with spiders and dollar store item, if you are going with a more spooky theme.

Add lights to your scary Halloween scene. Make your ghosts and goblins glow by adding purple craft lights.

Outline your front door. If you will be waiting at the door with treats, orange or purple mini lights will call attention to the door. Chasing mini lights leading up to the door create the look of a spooky landing strip.

Create a spiders web. Spiral purple rope lights against a background of black fabric to create a big spider’s web.

Graveyard with eerie lights. Using light stakes, string lights around a front lawn graveyard to make the lights look like a fence.

Add Halloween lights to the house. If you love celebrating with lights, go all out and cover every line of the house with orange lights. Who says lights are just for Christmas. Not us! Repurpose your Christmas lights by replacing C7 or C9 bulbs with different colors in the cords you already own. If you’ve already purchased LED cords with replaceable bulbs, you can easily change your colors for the season.

Do you need an easy way to add outdoor lights quickly? Use net lights.

Light the way for guests. If you have most plastic jack-o-lanterns that you can put in children’s hands, fill them with battery lights and hang them from the trees. They create enough light to welcome party guests and treat or treaters.

FIREFLIES---NEW TREND! One of our favorite hot trends this season for creating for created a more sophisticated autumn theme outdoors is filling a Mason jar with white, clear, or green battery-powered mini lights to create fireflies in a jar. Hang these from your tree to light the way for treat or treaters.

Indoor Halloween Decorations

Don't just stop with the great outdoors. Make wonderful memories with your family and brighten up the inside of your home.

Make sure you've considered these suggestions:

Add texture with lights. To create a mysterious Halloween mood inside, mix the brightness of lights with dark colors. Take a trip to the craft store to inspire your spooky projects.

Accent the mantle. Create a mantle scene with tiny lights and more delicate features, since your guests will get a closer look.

Light the windows. To create a window sill scene that can been seen from the street, use bigger lights and bolder characters. One of our customer uses her electric Christmas candles and fills them with opaque C7 (E12 base) bulbs. Her local fire department may have thought her house was... on fire. The kids on her block love it. So, for the price of a box of orange painted C7 bulbs, you can change the entire look of the front of your house when the sun goes down.

Lights and spiders. Mix icicle lights with hanging spiders as a trim for the top of your windows.

Halloween Costumes with Lights

It’s fun to add surprising little details to Halloween costume with fairy lights (formerly called microdrop lights). Because the lights are battery operated, you can just drop the battery pack in a pocket and go. Our microdrop lights are a great choice for costumes because they are so tiny.

If you are up for some more elaborate costume building, use our full size LED Battery lights. They are about the size of traditional mini lights and have 9.5 feet of sparkle that is sure to please even the pickiest princess. Just like our fairy lights, the battery pack is small and easy to hide.

All of our LED battery powered sets operate at cool temperatures so that’s one less thing to worry about.

Halloween Party Decorations

For children or for adults, think of Halloween as just another reason to throw a party.

Witches’ Cauldron. Create a the fire for a witches’ cauldron by using chasing orange and red lights under the cauldon covered with charcoal fabric. When the lights are bunched together, they appear randomized.

Just Enough Light. Keep guests on edge, ready to be scared by leaving all of the regular lighting off. Just line the baseboards of the hallways or any smaller spaces with mini lights. Let food tables provide the main light for larger rooms.

Accent the food table with glass blocks. These can be frosted and painted with stencils of spiders and bats that will seem to glow with the lights inside the blocks.

Dark Food Table. Cover the food table in black fabric then outline with mini lights or hang mini net lights from the sides.

Glowing Punch Bowl. Put icicle lights or mini lights under black organza to accent the punch bowl table. If your punch bowl is clear, arrange green mini lights to shine up through the bowl so it looks like a glowing potion.

Spooky Wall Deco. If you need to cover up your usual wall decorations, put curtain lights behind black or purple organza. You can also create a muted lighting effect by hanging curtain lights behind the sheer curtains.

Muted Lighting. For a more sophisticated theme, string your white Christmas lights above seating areas on arbors, gazebos, and porches then loosely drape colored fabric around the lights to create billows of color.