10 Unusual Halloween Gifts for People Who Never Pack It Away

There's a particular kind of person who doesn't do Halloween so much as observe it, quietly, all year, and once a year for three weeks in October everyone else joins in.

You know if you're buying for one. The decorations never entirely come down — they get moved to a different shelf and rebranded as "the aesthetic". There's a skull in the kitchen in March and nobody in the house finds it remarkable. The 31st isn't a costume night, it's just the one evening a year when the rest of the world comes closer to aligning with their tastes.

Which makes them easy to shop for and very easy to shop for badly, because anything seasonal is in a box by November. So this list has one rule: every single thing on it has to still make sense in February.

A word on "unusual", because we mean it; nothing here is a plastic pumpkin. And while we're on the subject, the pumpkin is an American import anyway. Britain and Ireland carved turnips for centuries before it showed up: hollowed out, given a face, left to rot on the doorstep. If you've ever seen a photograph of a Victorian turnip lantern, you'll know they were considerably more frightening than their American cousins.

Ten gifts, then, for the people who never pack it away. In no particular but definitely spooky order.

1. The Raven - Specimen Drawing

Start subtle. This is the one a visitor reads as curiously intriguing rather than a statement, which is exactly why it works — it's a Victorian natural history plate that happens to be of the most ominous bird in English literature.

The raven has earned every bit of that reputation. Corvus corax can mimic human speech, solve multi-step puzzles, and reportedly hold grudges against specific faces for years. The collective noun is an unkindness, which suggests somebody was paying attention. And Edgar Allan Poe, who made the bird permanently famous in 1845, was paid somewhere in the region of nine dollars for the poem, a fact that should comfort anybody currently doing creative work for insulting money.

The Common Raven Mug gives him fine antique linework and a border of oak leaves. Spooky by pedigree rather than by decoration, and it sits on a shelf in April without comment.

The rest of that range lives in Natural History Mugs, for the person whose spooky season comes with a bibliography. Perhaps you're shopping for something more in the Beetle or Moth variety?

2. The Hermit, who was originally about something else entirely

Tarot is a good gift precisely because it lets you say something specific, but only if you pick the right card, and most people pick the prettiest one.

The Hermit is the quiet choice and usually the correct one. He's the card for the friend whose idea of a perfect Friday is cancelling it. Here's the part that tends to surprise people, though: in the earliest Italian decks he wasn't holding a lantern at all. He held an hourglass, and he stood for Time; the old man reminding you it's running out. The lamp, and the whole business about inner wisdom and lighting the path, is a later reinterpretation. He started as a deadline.

The Hermit Skeleton Tarot Card Mug hands the card to a skeleton, which given the original meaning is arguably more faithful than the version with the lamp.

The rest of the deck — The High Priestess, Justice, and The Bat, which appears in no traditional deck and frankly should — is in the Tarot Card Mugs collection. Choosing the right card is the gift. The mug is just the delivery mechanism.

3. Skeletons, who have been making this point since 1424

The danse macabre turned up in plague-scarred Europe and was painted, of all places, on the walls of charnel houses — the earliest known one at the Cimetière des Innocents in Paris in about 1424. Skeletons lead the living away in a line: the pope, the emperor, the merchant, the ploughman, all of them equally unwilling and all of them going anyway. It was not subtle, and it was not meant to be comforting. It was meant to be levelling: the plague cared not whether you were beggar or king.

Six hundred years on, the joke still lands, which is why skeletons never really date. The Skeleton Hands Mug is the one that gets picked up and turned over by every guest who visits the kitchen, and the Skeleton Coffee Mug is for the person whose relationship with caffeine has entered its skeletal phase.

There's no dedicated skeleton collection — they're scattered through Spooky Mugs section, along with the tarot skeletons, which means a bit of browsing. Consider it part of the experience.

4. One skull. Not six.

Skulls are the load-bearing wall of this entire aesthetic, and the only way to get them wrong is quantity. One skull on a shelf is a statement. Six is a phase, and everybody can tell.

The White Skull Mug is the version that sits happily in a cupboard next to entirely normal crockery and causes no arguments — graphic rather than gory, which is the difference between a design and a prop. The Two Tone Skull Mug does the same job with a coloured rim and handle in four colourways, for the ones whose black has an accent shade.

5. Two mugs of pure atmosphere

Some people don't want a joke on their mug. They want weather.

Worth knowing what you're actually looking at with the Haunted House Mug: that silhouette — the tower, the steep mansard roof, the general air of a building that has seen things — is Second Empire architecture. It was the height of fashion in 1870s America, went comprehensively out of style, and spent the following decades decaying in every town in the country while nobody could afford to knock it down. Charles Addams drew one for his cartoons, Hitchcock built one on a backlot for Psycho in 1960, and that was that. An entire architectural movement now works one job, permanently, as shorthand for "something happened here".

Its companion, the Spooky Graveyard Mug, captures the specific calm of a moonlit churchyard — quiet neighbours, excellent atmosphere, nobody asking how your weekend was.

6. A cauldron, for the one with the unlabelled jars

Here's a genuinely odd bit of history: the witch's familiar — the cat, the toad, the imp in animal form — is a distinctly English invention. Trawl the English witch trial records and familiars are everywhere, named, described, occasionally itemised. Look at the Continental European trials and they're largely absent; those confessions ran to sabbaths and pacts instead. Two neighbouring legal cultures, two entirely different sets of (probably) imaginary crimes, both prosecuted with total conviction.

The Witches Brew Black Mug takes the legend rather than the grim reality, and it's the right gift for the friend whose kitchen already contains eleven jars of unlabelled dried something and an opinion about moon phases.

7. Day of the Dead, done properly

Día de Muertos is not Mexican Halloween, and anybody who takes this seriously will already be quietly irritated on its behalf. It falls on 1 and 2 November, it's a welcome rather than a fright, and the heart of it is the ofrenda — the altar of photographs, candles, food and marigolds built so the dead can find their way home for one night. The marigolds aren't decorative. The scent is what guides them.

And the sugar skulls are, literally, sugar. The technique is alfeñique, brought over by European missionaries, and it caught on for a very practical reason: colonial Mexico had sugar in abundance and precious metal it wasn't allowed to keep. So the offerings got made from what there was. A whole visual tradition, invented out of economics.

The Ofrenda Sugar Skull Mug puts that altar on black ceramic, candles lit. Its companion, the La Catrina Mug, honours the elegant skeleton first etched by José Guadalupe Posada around 1910 as a satire of Mexicans aping European fashion — Diego Rivera later gave her the name and the hat. A joke about pretension that has comfortably outlived everyone who was in on it.

There are six more — El Catrín, the Sacred Heart, the Marigold & Monarch and the rest — in Day of the Dead Mugs.

8. For the ones whose darkness comes in colour

Not everybody who loves this season wants black on black, and the ones who don't are frequently the most interesting people in the room. This is the loud end of the shelf and it is entirely unrepentant about it.

The Sun Eye Mug, the Cosmic Jellyfish Mug and the Rainbow Mushroom Mug are neon on black — third eyes, deep-sea things and fungi, all glowing like something you shouldn't look at directly. The Rainbow Snake, the Hamsa Hand and the Psychedelic Moth Sugar Skull complete the set.

All of it: Neon Gothic Mugs. Gothic doesn't have to mean funereal. It just has to mean you're not doing beige.

9. The desk mat, or: fixing the ugliest object you own

Here's where the whole argument of this list gets tested. A mug is used and washed and put away. A desk mat is looked at for eight hours a day, every working day, forever.

And in most homes it's the single ugliest thing in the room — a grey rectangle from a trade show in 2014, sitting under the hands of someone who has otherwise thought very carefully about every object they own. It is the one surface people inexplicably surrender.

The Skull Desk Mat takes it back. Black, graphic, and large enough to change the character of a whole desk rather than just decorate a corner of it. This is the gift for the person who has decorated every room in the house and then works at a rectangle of grey felt.

10. And the same idea, in full colour

We finish where the list has been heading all along. The Day of the Dead Desk Mat takes the ofrenda from number seven — candles, marigolds, sugar skulls — and spreads it across the whole working day.

Which is, when you think about it, the exact thing this entire list has been arguing for. Not a season. A surface you look at more hours a year than any picture you own, given over to something you actually like.

Both are in Desk Mats, alongside a few Tudor monarchs for anyone whose darkness runs more historical.

Buying in August is not madness, it's competence

It's August. You're reading a Halloween gift guide. You are, quite precisely, the audience.

The full seasonal range is in the Halloween Shop. And if the person you're buying for genuinely doesn't wait for October it's never too early to buy for them.

Haunted Bunny is the curious little corner of the internet where it's always Halloween. Some people need one night a year. We've built an entire shop on the assumption that they want it to be Halloween all year round.

Normal is overrated. 👻🐰