Halloween is quickly approaching! The stores are stocked with costumes and candy, skeletons and jack o’lanterns begin to appear in store windows, and soon the night of fright will be upon us. If your dorm is set to be the spot for a Halloween Fear Fest, there is the potential to seriously spook your wallet out of a few twenty-dollar bills. In order to throw a truly spooky night without waking up November 1 to the horror of an empty wallet, here are a few tips to stay under a $20 budget.
Tip #1: Never underestimate the power of construction paper and scotch tape. With a pair of scissors, a crafty undergrad can make all types of jack o’lanterns, from scary to funny, black spider webs, and green witches to tape to the window. If you are especially gifted with the paper, you can make three-dimensional decorations to hang from the ceiling (see below). A standard pack of construction paper from Walgreens costs $2.99. From this one pack of construction paper, you can cover about a fourth of your room. If color is no object, then you could even swipe a few pieces of paper from the printer and cover your windows in ghosts and skeletons. Since chances are you already have a stack of printer paper on hand, it costs nothing extra to cut out these decorations.
Tip #2: Spider webs are always a great way to fill the room with Halloween spirit. A 1 oz bag of synthetic fiber spider web can cover up to 40 square feet according to the Party City web site. At Party City, a 1 oz bag is only $0.99. You could cover 120 square feet of your dorm for less than $3.00. Once the webs are hung, they need spiders to go with them of course. A bag of 30 orange and black spider rings is again, only $0.99. Toss them up in the web and if one falls on the floor, someone can just pick it up and put it on their finger. At the end of the night, you can collect all the remaining rings, put them in a zip-lock bag and save them for next year.
Tip #3: A party is not a party without the proper lighting, especially on Halloween. While lighting can get a little expensive, if you know what to buy, it can still fall into the budget. Don’t fall into the cutesy pumpkin shaped lights or spider shaped lights because frankly, no one really notices the shape of the light. They notice the color. Standard orange string lights will create the perfect atmosphere for the dorm. A 21ft string of lights has 100 mini lights and is only $7.99 at Party City.
To sum up, if you buy one pack of construction paper, one bag of webs, one bag of spiders, and one string of lights, you spend a grand total of $12.96. That still leaves $7.00 to splurge on the giant assorted bags of Halloween candy at K-Mart. So spend smart and enjoy whatever your festivities may be in your Halloween ready dorm.
Photo Sources:
Paper Pumpkins
Spider Webs
Lighting
Halloween Candy