Highbrow Halloween
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This week, while watching Is it Cake? Halloween (our favorite family show) and relishing the return of pants season, I’m listing off my personal picks for highbrow Halloween decor.
These are actually good things—tasteful, attractive things—to place around your home during the spooky season.*
Black-and-white bounty
How do you make Halloween decor sophisticated? Easy! Just lean into black-and-white pieces.
As you may know, I’m ga-ga for the MacKenzie-Childs Courtly Check line. The hand-painted, Kris Jenner-coded checkered pattern is timeless and versatile. I have two pumpkins from the Halloween collection, and my thirst for more may never be satiated.
Skellies and skulls
Skeletons and skulls are THE neutral design elements of Halloween. Chic, chic, chic!
You can get these anywhere. I have a few classic skulls and animal skeletons from Target—my kids love playing with the cats, and they don’t break. I also like these creepily realistic ones from Amazon.
My 2025 pride and joy, though, is the 12-foot skeleton from Home Depot. This tall glass of water was sold out everywhere a few years ago and hawked for thrice the price on the black [Facebook] market.
He’s now in stock, and you can get same-day delivery for 30 bucks. It’s honestly even better in person—12 feet is bigger than you think!—giving full-size candy bar energy our trick-or-treaters can count on.
Complement the current decor
The key to highbrow Halloween decor is picking items that complement the rest of your design scheme. For me, it’s neutral pieces and black-and-white accents with a mix of cozy softness, warm hues, and high-contrast modernity.
I love the subtle ghost pattern on this Ikea throw blanket and how this lidded bowl goes with our tinted glassware. A neon ghost sign ties in the throw and adds mood lighting. I use these battery tea lights all over—for outdoor jack-o’-lanterns, to illuminate the skulls (just pop one in the mouth), and to make the mantle decor glow.
Carved wood pumpkins call back the grain of our floor planks and barstools. Meanwhile, this basketweave pumpkin nods to the natural textures and tones of our jute dining room rug.
Another thing is the Samsung Frame TV. It looks like a framed art piece, and you can change the image to match your mood or the season. Right now, we’re rocking avant-garde skull photography, but I’m thinking about changing it to a cool spiderweb picture later.
A few snaps from my home:
Sucks for my kids, but I’m not really into carving actual pumpkins. We have a growing collection of wooden, ceramic, resin, and plastic ones in white, green, and black. And then we supplement the front porch display with a few real (uncarved) pumpkins, typically white and that muted green hue.
Also, each year, we take a photo of our kids in skeleton jammies and have it framed in black and white. (The Keepsake app makes this really easy.)
Many of our family traditions revolve around pajamas: Everyone gets a fresh set on Christmas Eve, all the kid cousins get matching holiday ones on Thanksgiving, and this skelly jammies ritual for Halloween.
One more quick shout-out: these little melamine plates from Rifle Paper. My kids are eating breakfast on them all month.
*Some products with affiliate links might earn me a small commission.
My personal evolution as a big Halloween guy began with loving trick-or-treating as a child and then, naturally, growing out of it as a tween. I got into sexy-whatever costumes in college, then graduated to more well-thought-out ensembles as a young adult. After not doing much of anything for a few years while getting married and having kids, I dove back in with glee as a parent and attendee of real adult Halloween parties—you know, the type the parents go to in Hocus Pocus.
PS: You can tell a lot about someone by their past Halloween costumes (or lack thereof). A few of mine are:
Bart Simpson
Maleficent
Darth Vader
Ghostface (Scream)
Santa Claus
UPS driver
Cowgirl
Man wearing suit👇🏻
What I’m reading lately:
New York Mag | Quit Romanticizing Boredom
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