Vintage Halloween Lantern

Light your way through a spooky Halloween night with a vintage Halloween lantern. Jack-o-lanterns, black cats, and ghosts will keep you company on your journey.

Halloween is an ancient holiday that has a cast of characters that live very long lives. Vampires, while not eternal, live for hundreds of years. Zombies and ghosts defy death and return. Just how long has that very old witch been alive, you wonder. So its not surprising that older, vintage Halloween decorations are popular. Somehow they create the perfect Halloween vibe. Even with a full moon, the October sky can be dark and foreboding. Strategic vintage lanterns and lights are the perfect way to welcome your Halloween guests and trick-or-treators. A vintage lantern will make your porch look like a safe haven from all the devils that populate Halloween night. Halloween visitors will be ever so grateful and even if they have to walk through a zombie graveyard to arrive safely.

Paper mache vintage Halloween pumpkin lanterns are one of my most favorite types of Halloween decorations. Even when they smile they have an evil feel about them. It's like some antique doll collections that I've seen. Their stares haunt me for hours after I've left their rooms. As a child, I once visited a Doll Museum housed in an 18th Century Church on Cape Cod. Hundreds of antique and vintage dolls combined with the old church architecture gave me nightmares for weeks. The vintage pumpkins shown to the right have the same vibe for me.

I would display these vintage Halloween lanterns in the same way that I display primitive folk art. I always connect it to the purpose it represents. So these paper mache pumpkins, while they have to be protected from the elements, would be displayed in the barn door or on the porch. They'd look like they're still in their garden environment. I'd probably turn some old tin pails and buckets upside down and put some on the up-turned bottoms and others in front and to the sides. It would be quite the maniacal pumpkin patch.

Vintage Halloween Paper Mache Lanterns

Great selection on ebay!

If you want to do a vintage black and orange Halloween decoration display, then add a vintage paper mache black cat lantern to your vintage pumpkin lantern vignette described above. Our two barn cats just happen to be black (Busy Body and Chaos) and they love running around the pumpkin patch. When a cat smiles and bares it's teeth, it can have the same evil look as a crazed jack-o-lantern. Again, vintage ornaments and lanterns are often made out of materials that aren't made to withstand lots of extreme weather. So I usually find a place on the porch, by the fireplace, or in the door of an out-building to display them.

Cats always love a warm spot, so placing one by a witch's broomstick in the corner by the fireplace makes sense. It's not necessary to move them after Halloween unless I want to make room for Santa Claus displays.

The lines and colors of vintage lanterns bring us back in time. Which is what I think Halloween is often about. So many of us now discount magic, that we can only accept it if we think it died out generations ago.