Gilded & Gory: How to Create a Glamorous Halloween

I’ve never really liked Halloween. The goblins, the cobwebs, the older kids running around terrorizing the neighborhood…it all just annoys me. Like, can we please just fast-forward to Christmas already.

As I grew older, Halloween only seemed to get worse. The costumes for boys got scarier, and the costumes for girls got…scarier (you know what I mean).

Halloween scares the living daylights out of me!

So unless I wanted to be miserable every October, I needed to learn how to enjoy Halloween.

Here’s how I learned to love Halloween:

A few years ago, I decided that, instead of celebrating the holiday with all the usual icky things, I would celebrate the holiday with glamorous things.

I glam-ified Halloween and turned it into a reason to be… beautiful!

Sound fabulous?

Here are a few of the ways you can celebrate Halloween without gore:

Gold Leaf Stuff

Skip the illuminated inflatables this year and class up the hood with some easy gold-leaf crafts like pumpkins and skeleton masks.

To make them, start out by picking up some ceramic or cardboard Halloween objects at Amazon or Michaels. Better yet, try out your local Goodwill to see if they have any good stuff you could use. Like these:

Next, paint the objects with acrylic paint of your choice. When you apply the gold leaf, you can control how much or how little this color will show. It’s an easy craft project, I swear!

After the paint dries, begin at STEP 4 in my instructions for gilded Easter eggs. It’s the same (stinky, marvelous) process.

Note: in the photo above, I used gold leaf sheets to create full gold coverage. For a spottled look (like in my Easter eggs), you can use gold flakes.

Painted Gold Stuff

I used Golden Acrylics “iridescent gold” to create a light, sheer gold on these Halloween crafts.

If the labor of leafing isn’t in your cards, you’ll do just fine with this even easier craft project. Pick up a little bit of gold acrylic paint and you’ll have gold Halloween decorations in no time.

Gold reflects more hues than your average flat paint, and there are plenty of different shades of it. You can also try out other shimmery colors - why not!

Swizzle Sticks & Stirrer Stuff

Not the first time you’ll see my collection of swizzle sticks, and not the last. I’m obsessed. These swizzle sticks are actually oranges, but don’t tell anyone because they LOOK like pumpkins. Put them in your witch’s brew and you’ll have a wicked time.

Swizzle sticks are a recurring theme in my life. I think about them all the time and comb eBay almost every day to expand my collection. Why??? Because every Shirley Temple, every lemonade, every plain ol’ glass of ice water deserves to be decorated in finery. That’s why!

A few years ago, Target came out with the ones pictured above, but they break if you sneeze. So head over to eBay for the vintage ones, and you’ll find good quality swizzles that can stand up to your snizzles. Fo shizzle.

Ice Cubes

Now that you’ve got your swizzle sticks, go ahead and up your beverage game even more with themed ice cubes. The bone ice cubes pictured above are my favorite because, unlike other shapes, you can still see their outline once they’ve started to melt a little.

Check out silicone ice cube trays like these.

Givenchy Masks

Some Halloween I will recreate Marie Antoinette’s look! By golly!

It often seems that the only options for Halloween costumes for girls are to dress ugly, goofy, or trampy.

I dislike all of these options.

Instead, I would prefer to dress like Marie Antoinette at a diamond jubilee (head attached to neck, thank you very much).

And so a few years ago, I started wearing a crystal mask at Halloween.

Incidentally, I refer to the one in the picture above as my Givenchy mask because it reminds me of the face masks worn at the 2015 Givenchy fashion show:

Makeup artist Pat McGrath created these pearl face masks for a Givenchy fashion show in 2015.

⬆ By the way, if you want to recreate this pearl look (which is wonderful!!), you just need to get some self-adhering pearls and… a whole lotta patience.

Spooky Glassware

These skull glasses can be used for candies, drinks, or knick-knack-paddy-wacks.

These skull glasses decorate our mirrored tables in the October daytime and head over to the dinner table for the October evening-time. If I weren’t a TOTAL sugar junkie, I’d fill them with candies, but unfortunately I can’t be trusted around anything sweet.

Gold Feather Wings

Photo courtesy of Etsy seller Laceshine.

These magnificent golden wings come from Etsy seller Laceshine. I don’t own them yet, but I have a strong hunch I’ll be buying them for this Halloween. They’re glorious, don’t you agreeeeee?

Be sure to check out this seller’s other listings too—lots of fun, beaded doo-dads.

Blood Orange Macarons

Photo courtesy of Food52.

I am a terrible cook, but even I made delicious macarons a few years ago. They’re much easier than people want you to think, so if you’re up for the challenge (and if you have a helpful grownup within earshot), give them a try.

This Food52 recipe looks divine.

If you’re not in the mood for making your own from scratch (believe me! I get it!), think about other glamorous Halloween sweets such as two of my personal faves: orange sherbet and mango sorbet.

Turkey Feathers

I love having feathers around because, as weird as it sounds, I always seem to find a use for them. One minute I’m decorating with them, and the next minute I’m making dip pens for friends. You can find these in any color, including white, gold, and pure black. I like the dark brown because it feels less gothic than those choices. I decorate our place settings with these on Halloween night, and they look fabulous. Here’s some inspiration.

While we’re on the topic, a black & gold place setting such as this would be gorgeous at Halloween. Don’t you agree?

The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe

Every Halloween night, Christoph and I sit in the darkness sipping Devil’s Blood out of our skull glasses (see above). We take turns reading passages of Edgar Allan Poe aloud to each other. I’ve been amazed at how much I love the syncopation of his poetry.

We’ve also enjoyed listening to this version of Poe’s The Raven read by James Earl Jones:

It is so comforting having a fun Halloween tradition that we repeat every year. We love it.

Classical Music

I don’t know about you, but at first thought, I don’t necessarily think of classical music as scary. But boy am I wrong. It’s the scariest. Believe me. Check out this collection of scary classical music. It will surely set the ambiance for a glammy version of Halloween.