photo © Thomas Raven
My childhood Halloween memories come wrapped in Beistle (pronounced bye-stuhl) decorations. I believe that my mother purchased the Halloween Decorama set pictured above because we had all of the decorations contained within it. I can’t remember a Halloween that these designs weren’t a part of. I was lucky enough to find a set of these in unopened, like new condition and I still haven’t opened them. Perhaps I will one day.
I tell myself that I love these because the illustrations are so wonderfully evocative of the holiday but the truth is that they could have actually shaped the way I look at Halloween. At this point, it’s difficult to distinguish cause and effect.
You can still get reproductions of many of these decorations at the Vintage Beistle Store. Some are very similar to the originals, though the embossed cardboard cutouts will probably never be produced again. If you have your heart set on those, you’ll have to find them used. But don’t fret - they’re often available on Ebay and similar sites.
Beistle doesn’t publish sales figures from back in the day, but it’s a safe bet that they produced gajillions of these. They were available in every drug store and corner market. There are still quite a few of them floating around, but their prices are on the upswing. Search for Luhrs as well as Beistle since some of the originals were stamped with H.E. Luhrs’ name (the designer and son in law of company founder Martin Beistle).
As to what it is that’s so appealing about these pieces of disposable art, I cannot articulate. They give me such a rush of good feelings that I can’t view them objectively. I do like their hand-rendered qualities as well as their uniquely spooky/scary/funny qualities of the holiday. And the colors are so spot-on for Halloween that they define it for me. If you’re lucky enough to own these vintage goodies, I hope you display them every year so that these wonderful designs might influence yet another generation of trick or treaters!