I’ve never been known as the Martha Stewart type. Though I’ve dabbled in crafting all of my life, I’ve never really achieved anything close to perfection or even anything I would, ummm consider selling, I do like to craft and decorate and paint and all of those homey things.

What I don’t like to do is buy a lot of poorly made plastic decorations for each holiday. Unfortunately, holiday decorating has become a competitive sport over the past few years and we, I fear are left in the dust. My son and husband urge me to buy all sorts of light up electronic gadgets. We “ooh” and “ahhh” at giant blow-up yard decorations. We push all the buttons on the decorations in the Target seasonal aisle and then come home to our gently and quietly decorated house.

Our approach has been to focus on simplicity, home made and natural. Our trump card is that we engage all of the senses.

For Halloween we buy pumpkin scented candles. We make classic autumn recipes and fill the house with tantalizing smells.

We made out own scarecrow from my son’s old clothes…isn’t that how scarecrows got started? We stuffed the clothes with old newspapers and made a head from burlap with pom-pom eyes and yarn for hair. Then we used a bamboo pole and some tomato stakes to display it in our front yard.

A wicker cornucopia is filled with real squashes and mini pumpkins line the stairs and sit on top of dressers. The rest of our décor is handmade. Drawings and paper projects from a few years so far of school projects line the walls. Handcrafted ghosts and goblins and witches, from a variety of materials – projects we found in a variety of magazines and online - decorate tabletops.

And yes, we do have a few plastic spiders and the like, but, rather than purchase them new, this year I’m on a reuse bandwagon, so we’ll go to our local second hand store and see what’s available.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle – I think we’ve got it covered.