You’re trying to stay in a budget. You’ve blown all the money on fun-size Three Musketeers bars, but you still have a party to throw. Every year there’s more cool stuff for Halloween than ever — is it even possible to decorate for less than $100?

How about $5.53?

With a can or two of black spray paint and a keen sense of irony, you can make oddly creepy decor. Start with weird crap in your storeroom — a vase with fake flowers, a doll crib with or without the accompanying Cabbage Patch, crocheted toilet roll doilies, any kind of tacky knick-knack — the cuter and dumber the better. Spray the hell out of it.

Step two: find more ugly-cute crap and make it . . . wrong. Rub ashes on the clown painting. Spatter blood/paint on the kitchen goose plaque. Break fifteen Flintstones jelly glasses, just slightly, and arrange them in a kind of shrine to killer kitsch. Put the banality in evil. The pièce de résistance — black Christmas wreathes. Hell, paint a damn pine tree and drag it in, draped with bloody butcher’s twine. Then arrange it like any ordinary demented, homicidal housewife.

You’ve got your funereal, your snark, your unholy wedding of Martha Stewart and Edward Gorey. It will look highly creative, a quality prized by true Halloweenies, and also deeply disturbing. And it’s five freaking bucks, plus everything you can sneak out of Grandma’s garage, which, honestly, needed cleaning out.

Send Ruby a picture of your nastiest (PG-13) decorative work and you may see it published on this blog on Halloween. Or send me your questions about life, love, work, or money.

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