Halloween is my favorite holiday of the year and when it comes to decorations, only Christmas can compete with the many types of decorations available for Halloween. And since I’m also a vintage lover at heart, most of the items I find to collect tend to be either vintage or antique Halloween collectibles. Since so many early Halloween decorations were actually handmade, I find them much more interesting than their contemporary mass produced counterparts.
Vintage Halloween postcards are some of my favorites because I move fairly often and postcards are a nice and easy to transport collectible. I also like to send them to friends as well, especially those I know will hang onto them! There are many types of vintage Halloween decorations available though and as with any collection, in order to avoid it getting out of hand, it usually makes some sense to decide what you’d like to collect.
If you find yourself drawn to antique Halloween items in particular, you’ll have a lot of collecting niches to consider -- including die-cuts, papier-mache, lanterns and vintage candy pails -- the pre-cursor to the “trick or treat“ bag. The most popular Halloween decorations are American or German made. All of the early German made Halloween items were actually made and exported to the American market during the post-war period after World War I when Halloween was increasing in popularity as a holiday in the US.
Other Halloween collectibles that are highly sought after currently are hard plastic items, mostly toys, but also cake picks, candy holders, plastic pumpkins and Jack O’Lanterns. For years, most of the plastic collectibles were easy and cheap to purchase, but now they are so hugely popular that you’ll see these plastic Vintage Halloween collectibles go for big prices in Ebay auctions. So if you’re looking to get into collecting, but need to mind the budget, you may consider a different Halloween collection focus or just be very selective about your hard plastic toys.
One area that I find a fun place to focus attention is on some of the vintage German Halloween decorations. Most of them were made by homemakers so each addition to your collection will be completely unique, unlike the hard plastic Halloween toys. One of the popular themes in Germany at the time was the creation of vegetable people, so you can look for various German made Halloween decorations featuring them to pull together a well-themed collection.
You can find collectibles for all of the holidays, including vintage Halloween decorations and vintage Christmas decorations at Emma's holiday website: http://www.retroholiday.com/
