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I know a lot of people like to decorate their front porch for fall as soon as September rolls around.

I am not one of those people.

I LOVE Halloween, so Halloween gets its moment at our house first.

The skeletons, ghosts, spiderwebs and spooky decorations come out before the pretty fall pumpkins do. Once Halloween is over, I’ll switch things around and decorate for fall.

Because really, who is decorating specifically for Thanksgiving?

November is when the fall porch gets its turn.

But October? October belongs to Halloween.

I’ve Always Loved Decorating for the Holidays

Decorating for holidays is something I grew up with.

My mom decorated our house for holidays for as long as I can remember, and some of my favorite childhood memories are of pulling out decorations and seeing the house change for whatever holiday was coming next.

When my husband and I got married, I continued the tradition, although I’ll admit the amount of decorating varied quite a bit over the years.

Then we had our son.

That’s when I really started going for it again.

Part of it was simply that decorating holidays with a kid is fun. But I also realized pretty quickly that there’s such a short window when your child thinks putting skeletons all over the porch with you is the greatest thing ever.

I wanted to take advantage of it.

And because decorating the house is one of the things I remember so clearly from my own childhood, I wanted him to have some of those memories too.

So over the years, our Halloween collection has grown.

Not because I go out and buy an entirely new Halloween porch every year. Quite the opposite.

Most of what you see on our porch has been collected over YEARS.

And that’s probably my favorite part.

Our Halloween Porch Is a Collection of Things We’ve Found Over the Years

We have double front doors, and years ago I found two hanging skeletons at our local grocery store.

I bought one for each door, and they still come out every Halloween.

Our welcome mats are also old. I bought them at Cost Plus World Market years ago, and they have definitely reached the point where I need to replace them.

I’ve already started looking at what I might order for next year because apparently even Halloween welcome mats eventually have to retire.

Last year I added the “blood” lights around the doors, and I love what they add to the porch. They’re a little different from the rest of our decorations and look especially fun once it gets dark.

The signs next to the door are even more personal because my husband and I painted them ourselves at a local craft-night workshop a few years ago.

Are they professional Halloween decor?

No.

Do they come out every year anyway?

Absolutely.

Our Skeleton Has Been With Us for Years

A few years ago, my son and I picked out our big skeleton on Amazon.

He used to glow in the dark.

Used to.

After several Oregon Halloweens, he’s apparently lost a little of his youthful glow.

Relatable.

But he still gets his spot on the porch every year.

Then last year we found two Frenchie skeletons at Target.

We have two French Bulldogs, so obviously we needed two Frenchie skeletons.

There was really no discussion to be had.

They now hang out with our regular skeleton every Halloween, and I love them.

The Ghosts Are Cheap. I Use Them Anyway.

We also have two standing ghosts that I bought from Amazon.

And I’m going to save you from believing every Halloween purchase I make is amazing:

These things are crap.

Cute crap.

But crap.

The black eyes came off one of them last year, and whatever they came with to weigh them down was basically useless. One of the weights sprung a leak within about two minutes.

So now I use my actual weight plates to keep Halloween ghosts from blowing off my front porch.

Is that ridiculous?

Yes.

Did I bring the ghosts back out again this year anyway?

Also yes.

Because once they’re standing up and behaving themselves, they’re cute.

Sometimes that’s enough.

Some of My Favorite Decorations Are the Old Ones

The coffin-shaped welcome sign came from Michaels several years ago.

So did my skeleton flamingos.

And let me tell you:

The skeleton flamingos are my absolute favorite.

I don’t know why skeleton flamingos needed to exist, but I’m very glad someone decided they did.

We also have a skeleton cat that my son picked out at Michaels when he was about five.

It used to screech.

It hasn’t done that in years.

But at this point, that’s irrelevant. He picked it out when he was little, we’ve put it out for years, and now Halloween wouldn’t feel quite right without it.

Our witch came from HomeGoods years ago too. She’s another one of those pieces that gets pulled out every season and finds a spot somewhere on the porch.

None of this matches perfectly.

None of it was purchased as a coordinated collection.

And I think that’s why I like it.

My Favorite Halloween Decoration Costs Almost Nothing

Of everything on our porch, though, my favorite Halloween tradition isn’t one of the nicer decorations.

It’s the spiderweb.

You know the cheap stretchy spiderweb stuff you can buy practically anywhere around Halloween?

That.

It’s messy.

It sticks to everything.

And I have absolutely no intention of carefully taking it down, folding it up and trying to reuse it the following year.

At the end of Halloween, it goes in the trash.

Then the next year, my son and I start over.

Every Halloween we take a fresh package of spiderweb and stretch it all over the porch together.

There isn’t a plan.

We just make it.

That means every year’s web is a little different.

We also have one giant spider left over from the years when we were trying to go much bigger with our outdoor Halloween decorations, so he gets attached somewhere in the web.

It’s probably the cheapest decoration on the entire porch.

And it’s my favorite thing we do.

Because someday my son isn’t going to be standing on the porch with me stretching fake spiderweb from one side to the other.

For now, he still does.

So we’re making the spiderweb.

Why We Stopped Decorating the Whole Yard for Halloween

There was a time when we didn’t stop at the porch.

We decorated the yard too.

We had tombstones and bigger Halloween decorations and animatronics, and we really tried to go big.

There’s just one problem.

We live in Oregon.

Usually by the middle of October, we’ve had at least one decent storm.

And after you’ve gone outside and discovered your Halloween tombstone somewhere down the block enough times, you start reevaluating your decorating strategy.

Eventually we gave up on trying to decorate the entire yard and decided to concentrate on the covered porch instead.

Much easier.

Fewer neighborhood searches for missing tombstones.

Everybody wins.

We’re Not Finished Yet

What you’re seeing in these pictures is what our porch looks like for most of the Halloween season.

But we’re not completely done.

Once we get farther into October, we’ll carve our pumpkins and add those to the porch. I wait because I’d rather not have rotting jack-o’-lanterns sitting outside for half the month.

And on Halloween night itself, we add a few extra touches.

We’ll swap our regular outdoor light bulbs for red or orange ones and bring out the fog machine.

Because if there’s ever a night to be a little extra, it’s Halloween.

Then Halloween Comes Down and Fall Finally Gets Its Turn

Once Halloween is over, the skeletons go away.

The spiderweb goes directly into the trash where it belongs.

The ghosts and Frenchies get packed up.

And then I’ll decorate the porch for fall.

That’s when the regular pumpkins and fall colors can have their moment.

I actually prefer doing it this way because it makes November feel like its own little decorating season instead of putting out fall decor in September and staring at the same porch for three months.

Halloween gets October.

Fall gets November.

Christmas gets everything after that.

Seems fair to me.

The Best Halloween Decor Isn’t Always the New Stuff

Looking around our porch, I can tell you where almost every decoration came from and usually what was happening in our lives when we bought it.

There’s the skeleton my son and I picked out together.

The cat he chose when he was five.

The signs my husband and I painted.

The Frenchie skeletons that remind us of our actual dogs.

The flamingos I will apparently love forever.

And every year, there’s a brand-new spiderweb that my son and I make together.

That’s why I don’t feel any need to replace everything with a perfectly coordinated Halloween porch.

I’ll probably buy new welcome mats.

I’ll inevitably find something else ridiculous that I think we need.

But most of it will come back out of the same storage bins next year.

Because for me, decorating for Halloween isn’t really about creating a brand-new porch every October.

It’s about pulling out the old stuff, adding a little something new, and doing the same silly things together that I hope my son remembers someday.

Just like I remember doing with my mom.