Indoor and Outdoor Easter Decorations

Sure, Christmas has its Jolly Old St. Nick, but its Easter counterpart has a cuddly friend of its own: the Easter Bunny. When Spring hops on in with Easter at its tail, you can celebrate the season with a number of indoor and outdoor decorations worthy of any winter holiday display.

Indoors

First things first: the Easter basket. While they make great gifts, they also serve as excellent holiday centerpieces and mantle displays. Make your basket as elaborate and interactive as you choose - fill it with candy for visitors and little ones, or place decorative eggs and pastel tissue paper inside for a more grown-up presentation.

For a simpler, cleaner, modern look, opt for a traditional Easter flower. A vase of white lilies, offset with springy green hydrangea and yellow daffodils, makes for an elegant holiday reminder.

Or, perhaps you'd like to revisit your childhood with a glass plate covered with colored eggs. Simply slow-boil eggs, then mix up a cup of boiling water, a tablespoon of vinegar, and a few drops of food coloring. Dip eggs and place them in an empty egg carton to dry.

Outdoors

While no sources can confirm exactly when the Easter egg hunt tradition began, today, we can certainly claim it one of the holiday's most popular activities - and certainly a reason to get outside and decorate the lawn.

You may be hiding plenty of candy-filled plastic eggs here and there to be collected in inexpensive baskets, but make your egg hunt a complete party experience with themed napkins and plates (and a few hard-boiled eggs for snacking), festive pastel crepe-paper garlands, and bunches of Easter lilies.

Indoor Decor for Halloween

Halloween is a night of spooks, bumps, and otherworldly frights, and preparing the outside of your home for it may seem easy enough (a well-placed jack-o-lantern or two usually does the trick). But bringing some Halloween treats inside is as easy as re-imagining any traditional holiday decoration.

• The Halloween wreath: Rather than a lush green wreath, add a Halloween touch to your door with a wreath-sized spider web, or make your own with long white or black pipe cleaners (spiders are optional).

• The Halloween lighting scheme: Candles are perfect for Halloween's old-world style; seek out a few black ones for dramatic effect. But because Halloween is often a time to remember safety, get the same low-lit ambience of real candles atop your tables with a few electric ones wound in a yard or two of black cloth.

• The Halloween garland: Also easy to replace is the traditional evergreen garland. Instead, some store-bought webbing can be stretched and wrapped around door frames and railings or draped from curtain rods and across mantles. Mix it up with strings of orange-colored lights for an eerie glow.

• The Halloween centerpiece: Mums are standard fall flowers, and a vase of them in orange is just the ticket for Halloween table decorations. Make seasonal floral arrangements even more festive with decorative floral sticks topped with ghosts, bats, pumpkins, and spiders. Or, skip flowers altogether for pure treats: Fill a trick-or-treating bucket or a few ornate goblets with your favorite candies.