Budget Celebrations: The Hostess Guide to Year-Round Entertaining on a Dime [Paperback]

This is a book with 143 pages to give you some entertaining ideas. It is titled budget, but the first celebration shown is Halloween with a walk and porch lined with 24 large pumpkins. Unless Shelly Wolson knows of a place to get pumpkins at  the cost of what I have seen them for, this is no budget decoration. There are some ideas, such as using garbage bags and cutting it into streamers, but many of her thoughts will take more money than what is normally defined as `budget'. Many of the decorations shown are store bought. The ideas are good, as are the recipes for many of the celebrations.

As for recipes, there are 5 for Halloween, 14 for Thanksgiving - a dinner, except her pumpkin pie recipe hardly has any spice in it (at least to my family's taste), 9 cookie and appetizers for Christmas, New Year's and Valentines- 15, 7 for Easter.
There are a few good ideas for Christmas; but she does not advise light weight rubber gloves to make decorations with red pistachio nuts, and unless you want to run around with celebratory red fingers, that is an omission. The Christmas pecan-jam stars (cookies) are wonderful.

There are really only a few celebrations contained here, they are: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's and Valentines Day share the same chapter, Easter, then 4th of July and special occasions. This is really not an all encompassing budget decorating, entertaining book. There are some good ideas, but one finds themselves looking at Easter with only one decorating idea?

The ideas are strangely uneven at times - between decorations and recipes, and it is almost as if plans for decorating run out of steam by the end of the book. There are 5 recipes for summer but no decoration? There are detailed how to instructions at the end, but they are really focused on Halloween and Christmas. There are some good ideas in here, but many are certainly not budget.