alloween trees should be black, gnarled, and festooned with creepy little ornaments. Some spiderwebs don't hurt either. My ideal one would be very realistic, like the plastic vegetation you see on really good model train tracks, with realistic hanged men and Spanish moss and ghosts and other such things on it, and jack-o-lanterns and tombstones and other such fun things below it. Throw in a few back-arching black cats and witches on broomsticks and bats, and you've got holiday magic that fits on a table or desk. You can even put little bags or boxes of Halloween candy beneath them, in a cunning Christmas simulation.

That's not what I made.

I'd also like a full size Halloween tree; I mean outdoors, molded from plastic or rubber or sprayed cement, jet black or at least very dark/dying brown, with much the same ornaments, though in life size.  Fog making machinery and rumbling tombstones with moans of the damned optional.

That's a bit beyond my budget for now.

What I did make for Halloween 2003 was what I could realistically make for a decoration that wouldn't cost very much time or money, and could be created from inexpensive/free ingredients that I had readily at hand.  This page compiles and adds to the various daily blog updates that talked about and documented this project, and should give you ideas about how to make your own, if you share such inclinations with me.

• September 29: Halloween tree concept discussed.
• October 6th: discussion of how lame the Halloween decorations in general are most places, and especially at Hallmark stores.
• October 10th: First photos and technique discussion.
• s
• November 1st: final display with photos.

My initial comments on the concept of a Halloween Tree were posted on Septmber 29th, 2003, and they sum up the subject well enough to repeat them here.

A Halloween Tree is like a miniature Xmas tree made from black metal, or is a modeled dead tree, cemetery/full moon styled.  They come hung with ghosts or devils or witches, and usually with a bristling display of gravestones over their roots. Plus there are little packs of Halloween ornaments of every type, black cats, ghosts, demons, bats, etc, which you can hang on your tree or key ring or just tape to a wall.  I suppose I'd seen such objects in years past, but they had never penetrated my consciousness until now.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the ones you see for sale suck. 

the ones at both of those stores sucked, and then when we hit Michael's and Target later on the way home, they didn't have anything we wanted either, in terms of Halloween stuff.  The only trees we saw were very simple things all off metal, with snail-shell style spirals at the end of a dozen black twists of metal.  Basically they are low grade clothes hangers that have been painted black and formed in unimaginative fashion.

Malaya claims to have seen a really good tree for sale somewhere, possibly at the first store we hit by the IHOP, but I have no memory of seeing a good one yet.  I am tempted to make one, either by twisting up a dozen coat hangers into creepy dead tree-type designs, or by forming actual tree fragments.  Malaya says we could get a nice piece of the baked branches they sell at fish stores and mount that on one end and hang stuff from it, and that's not a bad idea either.  It's certainly less work.

I don't know what we're going to do, but I'm interested in getting or making something and then decorating it. 

I also talked about it on October 6th, and the lame friendliness of most Halloween stuff in general:

One thing that we've been noticing as we shop for cool Halloween Tree ornaments is how lame most of them are.  And by "lame" I mean "not even remotely scary."

I suppose this Disneyification of Halloween was inevitable, as the holiday has become more and more mainstream, but that doesn't make me happy about it.  What I'm talking about are the little decorations and miniatures; ghost and goblins (actually I've yet to see anything anywhere that resembles a goblin) and witches and skulls and etc... they're all ridiculously cute.  All smiling and cute faces, no blood or bones or anything unsuitable for 5 year olds.  You can still see some sort of scary stuff at Halloween stores, but just in terms of masks or larger decorations. All of the tiny little collectibles, the types of things we want to hang on our Halloween tree, are just absurd.

Some cute stuff, for people stuck with kids who can't handle reality, is fine, especially in silly places like the Halloween display at a Hallmark store.  But must all of it be so watered down and cutesy?  It's like fricking Easter with black bunnies and duckies.

Lots of the stores have these cute Spooky Hollow miniature figures meant to be hung from something, like very small Xmas ornaments. They come in boxes of about a dozen for about $15, pretty affordable.  The problem is that while there are 4 or 6 good ones per box, the rest are like happy little witches, or laughing ghosts, or cute black kitties, etc.  We don't want to buy a box of stuff when half of it is too mood-killing to display.  My idea is that we get that and then give away the happy ones, or just don't display them, or hell, destroy them.  Partially melt them to make them creepy, paint their faces black, cut off their heads or arms, and so on.

The whole Halloween Tree project has come to a halt the last few days since we got a golden wire Xmas tree, with plans to distress it and bend the wire curls into creepy shapes and glue bits of wood to it to ugly it up and then paint it all flat black.  The tree and wood and paint are here, but I've been distracted with other stuff and haven't gotten to spend any daylight hours screwing with it. I want to take some pictures of the process, though I'm pretty sure the end result will be more amateurish/home made/cheesy than it will be thematic and creepy.  Like a project far too lame to even be included on the Cockeyed page. *sigh*

Since the final fate of the Halloween Tree is likely going to be a kitty punching bag, I'm not sure why we're so worried about the appearance anyway.  It's just something to do, and I like to decorate since Malaya enjoys it, and she likes to decorate since I enjoy it.  Funny how that works.

I've mentioned several times over the last couple of weeks, Malaya and I are doing some Halloween decorating, and for the centerpiece we naturally desire a Halloween Tree.  Well, actually we desire a living leprechaun werewolf held prisoner in a small wrought-iron cage and bound with silver-coated titanium chains, but that's a bit out of our budget for now.

So we're settling for a Halloween Tree.  What's that, you ask? Well, through the magic of Google I found one that's not far off, and it's on the Barbie site, of all places.  It's pretty low-rent, just a couple of dead branches in a pot, but it's a simple concept.  I haven't seen any that simple in the stores; most are larger, overpriced, and corny. Like this thing, for instance. It's like something your grandmother would think was cool.  All I wanted was something like a small decorative Christmas tree, just all ugly and dead and leafless (needle-less?) and with twisted, gnarled branches suitable for hanging creepy ornaments from. We saw several metal ones that weren't too far off, they were black and made of clothes hanger-like metal pipes, but they were too simple, just little twists of metal.

I can't find the exact tree we purchased online, but it looks a bit like the second row on this page. Ours was was far cheaper though, and as you can see, it's just a simple design.  There are 16 of the clothes hanger-thickness metal bars, and four of them peel off into a spiral every six inches or so.  It's actually a pretty good design, since it makes the trunk taper as it ascends, just like a real tree.  There are coils of a smaller metal pipe around the tree just below each set of "branches" to hold the whole thing together, and the base is made up of four much thicker bars.  That's actually sort of a pain, since I wanted to twist them around as well, to simulate old roots, but they're too thick to bend without a bench vise or extensive straining, and I'm afraid I'd just break them off.

The branches, on the other hand, are easy meat.  They are just about identical to clothes hangers (and may have begun life as them, for all I can tell) and can easily be bent by hand, though I wore gloves for some bruise-prevention and used pliers for some of the finer bends.  Most of which proved irrelevant, as I'll discuss below.

I tried to keep the branches spaced somewhat evenly, but not so neat that it would look fake.  The idea is that it's an old, dead tree, ideally one growing over a desecrated graveyard.  Some hanging moss and perching crows wouldn't hurt either.  Such trees invariably have a lot fewer branches than our tree, but real trees also have thick trunks, real bark, weigh several tons, and stand over 50 feet tall, so since we want something to put on our living room shelf, we're making modifications where necessary.

As you can see it's been bent and mangled a lot and looks funky, but it's far from suitable as of now.  It's ugly, but far too golden (mostly due to the flash, it's more of a bronze in person) to pass for more than an avant-garde Xmas tree art sculpture.

This will change.

My idea all along was to bend and distort it, and then glue or fasten bits of actual wood onto it, before painting the whole thing jet black.  To do that I obviously need the metal tree, black paint, a bunch of bits of wood, and something to fasten them on with.

The wood was easily-obtained; they have little decorative wreaths at every crafts store for low prices.  You can see a close up here of one that cost me $3.  It has enough wood to make about 20 of these things, though many of the branches are too slender for my needs, and since they all go in a circle, you have to work to alternate the patterns to avoid a sort of whirlpool pattern to the tree.

The paperclips are sort of hard to work with though, so on our last trip to a discount store we got a variety pack of metal wire.  Twelve spools of all different colors for $3.  They aren't sturdy enough to do heavy work with, but they should be more than enough to hold the twigs onto my tree with.

You can see how things looked after day one in the shots below.  The metal frame is still easily-visible, but I'd spent about 45 minutes applying wooden its to the metal frame and it was starting to take shape.  Literally.

My initial work on the metal frame was far too painstaking, I realized as I began to apply the wood. I could have used it just as it was, but I'd have had to tie on pieces of wood less than a finger in length, and that would have been way too much trouble.  Plus it would have looked silly to have so many branches extending such a short distance from the tree while bending around so much.

Therefore, once I began putting on the sticks, I pulled most of the metal limbs out straighter than I had initially intended, and then fit 4 or 6 or 8 inch pieces of actual wood to them, tying most of them in two places for stability. The eventual spray paint will help to sort of glue them on as well.

I had covered a lot less than half of the tree at the time of the photos here, stopping when it was too dark outside to do more detail work.

The next afternoon I spent another 30 or 45 minutes adding on more bits of wooden branch.  You can see a shot from near the end of my work time below on the left, with a shot of my whole work area to the right.  As you can see, the wooden wreath isn't diminished at all by the work to date.  It's actually running out of branches large enough for my purpose since most of the wreath is made of twigs, so I'm probably going to go walk around the grounds and scrounge up some more sticks from the wooded area around our condo.

The wreath is damn odd itself.  As I'm unwinding it, working from the inside since that's where the larger branches are, it's puzzling me, since it's not just a woven bunch of sticks, as I had expected.  It was clearly grown in the spiral shape it has been dried in, for most of the branches have little limbs and tendrils that wrap around others next to them, and individual branches make several rotations.

I mean that literally. As I start to pull out one single branch it proves to be more than six feet long, growing in neat circles around and around inside of the wreath, and as far as I can tell, the whole thing is like that. So they somehow grow these things like this, or else harvest some long, springy vines and wind them around something to get them into this wreath shape, and let them grow for a while in that form, since there are little tendrils and small branches that have grown all through and around the other limbs. It's sort of creepy, really.

Next update, October 10th:

I spent some more time bending the branches (mostly making them straighter, removing a lot of the kinks and twist I'd put in) and then finished applying the branches to it, eventually adding twigs to at least 95% of the metal, and extending the sticks well off to the ends of the wire in numerous places.  You can see the finished model below, both before and during the spray painting process.

The painting was easy; I just used a paper clip to hook an upper limb and turn it around after spraying at it from every angle, and in about five minutes the whole thing was done.  I left it to dry overnight and then painted it upside down the next day, holding it by one of the legs.  Lots of the bottoms of branches were still brown and brass, so this was necessary. I did some sideways touch up the next day, and while it's far from perfectly ebony over every square cm, that's okay.  It's supposed to look a little ragged.

With the painting finished the decoration could begin.

We had a bag of mixed Halloween toys that cost us about $3 at Michael's, and that came in very handy.  It provided all of the orange spiders, the five finger puppet evil figures, the five larger plastic spiders, the bats, and the few black spiders we put on top of the cotton spiderwebs.  A bag of the fake spiderwebs, of which we used about 1/20th, was like $1.50, and I twisted craft wire around several other ornaments, decorative rocks and such that I got for about $1 each, and hung those as well.

Here you see a couple of shots of the completed thing, sitting on our bed since the kitties wouldn't leave me alone long enough to take any photos of it on the floor, and I was able to lock them out of the bedroom for long enough to take these shots.  Or mostly lock them out, as the next two photos attest.

I only covered one face of it with the cotton spiderwebs, thinking that it would be cool to have a different look from side to side, and also that I didn't want to bury all of my nice wood work and decorations beneath obscuring cotton strands.

Malaya's idea was to put some of the black plastic ring spiders on top of the white spiderwebbing, but I didn't put the stuff on heavily enough to make the black ones on top of it visible, so that plan was scratched for now.  Perhaps next year, if we dig it out and make some modifications before display?

 

Does Jinx like it?  Does she smack at it if given any chance whatsoever?

Of course she does.

Isn't she cute as she does herself permanent brain damage from the paint fumes?

Of course she is.

 

The finished product has been displayed proudly atop one of our speakers (on top of a bunch of thick books, since we need to get it up out of kitty-swatting range) for some weeks now, and we're happy with it. I'm not sure how long after Halloween you are allowed to continue displaying your Halloween Tree before you become white trash. I think Xmas lights are allowed until late-January, with the actual non-White Trash cut off day graded on a curve depending on the weather where you live.

The more snow the later you can go, but I don't care if you live in Siberia, if Valentine's Day rolls around and your light strings are still up and they aren't all pink, you might as well grow out a mullet.

As for the Halloween decorations, if they're outdoors I think second week of November, tops.  Indoors those ghosts and skulls will start to look pretty damn ridiculous by November 5th.

The Halloween Tree, however, transcends dates, and looks good year round. Especially if you spent a lot of time making it and it's pretty fragile and covered in loosely-applied plastic ornaments and you've got no closet space to store it away anyway. Therefore I conclude that you should display it proudly year round.  Just like we're going to do.

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