It’s important to get the lighting just right for your scary Halloween party but many shop-bought lights like outdoor string lights or illuminated witch decorations are expensive and often don’t create the right atmosphere.
One of the simplest and cheapest ways to brighten up any Halloween party is to use simple tea-lights. Bought in bulk, they cost very little and can be used in many different ways to create the perfect scary ambiance.
Halloween Lights
The obvious way to use cheap tea-lights for Halloween lights is to place them inside carved pumpkins. With no electric required, the pumpkins can be placed inside and outside the party venue to give off a spooky glow when darkness falls.
But don’t just limit yourself to pumpkins. Make some DIY tea-light holders like these:
- Draw spooky shapes onto paper bags, half fill them with sand and pop a tea-light inside (see picture below). If the bag is too tall, roll over the edges so they don’t flap around and catch fire.
- Use glass jam jars as tea-light holders; paint ghostly eyes on the sides and place either on the floor or tie wire around the neck to hang from trees or to make tea-light lanterns. Try to use different color jars to create a set of lights or place colored tea-lights inside instead.
- Small ceramic pots make good tea-light holders, like the tiny ones you can buy filled with citronella to ward off mosquitoes in the summer. Pull together as many as you can find and glue them to a solid base so no-one trips over them.
- Old paint tins also make excellent tea-light holders. Fill them with sand and place your tea-lights inside. Red or brown paint works especially well as the tins will already have streaks of “blood” down the sides, so you don’t have to decorate them!
- Create a path of tea-lights by sticking them in a line onto a long piece of hardwood; then simply light them when your guests arrive.
Bulk Tea Lights
To keep Halloween lighting costs to a bare minimum, try to buy bulk tea-lights in packs of 100 pieces. These can be found at hypermarkets and DIY stores and are far cheaper than buying small packs by the dozen.
While scented and colored tea-lights cost a little more, it’s a good idea to buy a couple of packs of each to mix in with the plain lights; even scented lights can be bought in multi-packs and add a special touch to any Halloween decorations.
Halloween Tea-Lights
Save money on Halloween decorations for 2020 by using cheap tea-lights as your main lighting source. The soft glow created by hundreds of tiny lights will create a beautiful atmosphere and using homemade votive holders is eco-friendly too.