Outdoor Holiday Decorating Ideas
Although it's fairly common to see holiday decorations celebrating Christmas and Hanukkah, some families enjoy displaying festive decorations at holidays throughout the year. A couple of standard ideas for year-round holiday decorating include hanging a different wreath for each holiday and keeping lights in place all year in order to show off decorations after dark. Beyond these basics, holiday decorations of any kind and any time of year are only limited by your imagination. Does this Spark an idea?
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New Year's Eve
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Hang a giant banner across the front of your house, proclaiming goodbye to the old year and welcoming the new one. Banners can be purchased from sources such as esigns.com (see Resources); however, they can also easily be made by buying a length of oilcloth and using markers to write a personalized Happy New Year wish. Position spotlights above the banner so that it gleams in the winter night.
Valentine's Day
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Announce your fondness for the 14th of February and provide passersby with smiles by decorating the front of your house with hundreds of hearts. Simply cut red hearts ranging from 12 inches across to a whopping 30 inches across from red oilcloth. Get the whole family involved cutting out the hearts and attaching them to the front of the house, random polka-dot style, with loops of painters' tape attached to the backs.
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Fourth of July
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It's all about red, white and blue on Independence Day, so go all out with some painted furniture. Look in thrift stores or at garage sales for old wooden and metal chairs, benches, and tables that you can pick up for bargain prices because of their poor condition. Clean the furniture and sand all the pieces well. Then paint each piece with red, white and blue stripes, using masking tape to mark off each section as you go. Coat the furniture with a polyurethane finish and set it out in the yard. Top tables with centerpieces created from flags stuck into sand-filled flowerpots.
Halloween
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Give the front of your house a creepy haunted look by bathing it in green light. From large sheets of poster board make giant creepy faces the size of your windows and place them peering out of your windows. Use a large box such as a refrigerator carton to create a half-closed coffin; create a "body" from old clothes stuffed with newspapers and a creepy mask. Hang plastic skeletons from trees.
Thanksgiving
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Make a family of scarecrows that matches your family members in height. For each, start with a couple of two-by-twos nailed together into a T-shape. Add old clothes from each family member, using rope to hold clothes on. Stuff some straw into the arms and legs. Make a head from an old pillowcase or cloth bag, and let each family member draw his or her own face. Add a hat and stick the scarecrows into the ground.
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