Seasonal Decorating, Vintage Style
You can’t beat vintage for seasonal décor items. Vintage pieces are often better made than their modern counterparts, and you can find pieces at widely varying price points depending on your budget. I love that whatever you bring into your home won’t be found on everyone’s mantle in the way that mass produced seasonal items can be. And the sustainable benefits go further than giving new life to old objects. Buying vintage helps to reduce company metrics of seasonal production cycles, which count on people buying newly made seasonal items EVERY YEAR. There are some weird old items still lingering out there in the world, which makes Halloween one of my favorite holidays for second-hand.
Please note that there are no affiliate links here - these are items that I’ve found and find fun, and they are linked for your convenience.
I’m going to regret sharing these candleholders with you. The profile is giving me batwing/spiderweb vibes in the best way. I’ve almost bought them about 5 times.
For my family, intensive seasonal decorating pretty much only happens for Halloween and Christmas, and I make sure that any additions fit into the storage I have designated for those holidays. I go through my seasonal items every year when I take them out, and again when I put them away, in order to let go of anything that no longer makes the cut. Sometimes these items will go to my Buy Nothing Group (more on that below), and sometimes vintage items are worth reselling to offset the cost of any items that may replace them. Even though vintage is more sustainable than buying new, if you’re finding that your space feels too cluttered or you don’t have the space to store items, then adding more items may not be sustainable for you and your lifestyle. Guard your energy out there, folks.
One way that I approach minimizing seasonal storage is to choose items that are versatile - things that I can use for multiple holidays, in multiple rooms, in multiple ways. While the skulls are Halloween specific, I use these same candleholders from late September all the way through February, swapping out the candle colors and other items to take us from Halloween to Thanksgiving to Christmas to “Love Day,” as we call it in our house. As for my grandmother’s Christmas Village, it stays out year-round because she used to keep it out year-round. Not everyone would consider that a versatile seasonless piece, but it works for our family. In the fall it gets a Halloween takeover of skeletons, skulls, and ominous creeping plants, and we turn on the lights at the transition from fall to winter.
Incorporating vintage into your seasonal décor doesn’t mean that you need to go all out to create a fully matching display of vintage items all at once. I love to add a vintage item or new piece of art to contribute to a look I already love, or add something that lets me change up the vibe of my décor without replacing the whole look. I will use the same bones each year (pun very much intended), and swap out specific pieces so that I’m still excited about my setup each year. As with any furniture or decor, don’t feel like you need to stick to one era. The goal isn’t to create a period-specific museum exhibit. Mixing items that you love from different eras can keep your decor looking like it belongs in your home. I chose to look for candleholders that were clear or had orange undertones regardless of era/age. The range of colors from pink to red still works because of that orange undertone tying everything together. It lets me play up the orange in the fall, and keeps my reds from looking too one-note in the winter.
For my dining room setup I have French depression glass, early 50s Deco/MCM transitional glass, 1960s West German acrylic, and 1970s Swedish Brutalist glass candleholders jiving harmoniously from season to season.
For Halloween, I have 2 favorite go-to vibes. I love things that are just a hair off – spooky without being a downright gore-fest. I also love bright and colorful Halloween décor that takes the fun far beyond orange and black. Our dining room is typically the spookier zone and the bright, colorful vibe reigns in our Family Room. I often switch up the same items between these two looks so that displays are not 100% the same from year to year. We’ll have a few little spooky vignettes in other areas of our home, but we do not have many horizontal surfaces that can support seasonal décor. This means we do seasonal wall art swaps in those areas to keep things festively uncluttered. Wall art is compact and easy to store, which is an added bonus. And if you don’t find any pieces that speak to you, see what you and your family come up with! I keep a folder of seasonal art that my kids make, which comes back up onto the walls of the family room each year.
My daughter LOVES Halloween, and these colors in our family room feel as fun as the excited kid energy that flows through the house for the entirety of fall. She reminds me that it’s technically still fall until mid-December, and I’m happy to hold onto all the pumpkin fun as long as it keeps feeling fun for us. This usually equates to putting Halloween items away when Christmas items come out the first weekend in December.
Not sure where to start? Budget and time matter when it comes to vintage sourcing. When my budget is small, I’ll start in my own home to see what I can move around and repurpose. And I’ll head to my Buy Nothing Group. If you haven’t heard of The Buy Nothing Project, it organizes hyper-local, fully gifted economies where no money is exchanged and neighbors give of their own abundance to one another. In addition to posting items to gift, you can request items that you’re in search of. This is especially helpful when you have something specific in mind, and often times these requests are helpful to community members who have things lying around that are no longer serving them. Check out the Buy Nothing Project to learn more and see how to find the group near you.
For items that aren’t free but won’t break the bank, I check out Goodwill, local thrift stores, and the local Habitat For Humanity Restore. While décor can sometimes cost a little more on places like Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist, furniture is often cheaper there. Keep search terms a bit vague to find more pieces and better prices. Often times, people are selling items on these marketplaces to get rid of them quickly, and if they do not want to invest the time in researching their items, you won’t find specific identifiers or age/era descriptors in the listings. You’ll have to sift through more listings, but you’ll find more gems. If the online only aspect is important to you, Goodwill also has an auction site where you can have things shipped right to your door. These sourcing avenues often take time and patience, as you need to search through a lot in order to find worthwhile items.
For Halloween, searching “cat décor” on Facebook Marketplace is a treasure trove. I found this cat/bowl combo for $3.
If you’re local to the Philadelphia area, you can make this black cat yours here.
If you’re looking for less digging (either in person or online) and more gems, local vintage shops and Etsy are great places to start. You’ll find that items are priced a bit higher, but remember that someone is doing all the sifting and heavy lifting to curate a shop of the good stuff. While there are a large range of prices available, décor-wise I tend to be happy with what I can find second-hand that’s comparable to the pricing in many cookie cutter home stores. A word of caution, Etsy does require a bit of common sense these days. If you venture into the “handmade” realm, much of Etsy isn’t actually handmade anymore. If the price looks too good, it probably is.
Another mid-range vintage favorite for me is Chairish. I love Chairish for vintage art, which pairs VERY well with Halloween, even if that wasn’t the original intent of a particular piece. There’s some wonderfully creepy old art out there, friends.
Chairish definitely leans more luxury for the vintage portion of their site, and some items have the price to match. I head there for inspiration ALL THE TIME, and I do some purchasing there as well (like some of my vintage candleholders). With the help of price-based searches, you can filter out anything outside of your budget.
When it comes to decorating, it should be what speaks to you. I choose not to force out the objects that I love seeing every day to make way for the seasonal. These birds are one of my favorite vintage finds, and I think they rather love being surrounded my spooky things instead of being in a box all season. Perhaps I’ll look into some creepy vintage bird finds for next year so that they can join the party a bit more formally.
Do you tend to decorate for fall or for Halloween? Do you think your displays would benefit from a seasoned vintage addition?
