C is for Costumes

You know that Halloween was last week, so I want to talk today about how we do costumes in our family. First, though, let me go over Halloween. We don’t give the “holiday” much emphasis in our family, but we also don’t avoid it altogether. The downtown association in our town sponsors a trick or treating event every year where the local businesses along the main drag offer candy (and other goodies – coupons from the dance studio, toothbrushes from the dentist, etc) for the children. It’s a completely safe way to do trick or treating, and it’s always really fun to see all the children’s costumes.

We don’t buy – or let our kids buy – the costumes from the Halloween section of the grocery store. We try to be more original than that. We encourage them to dig into their imaginations and come up with costumes that they can either make themselves, or create using clothing they already own. So, without further ado, here are the costumes for 2014.

Small Fry went as a football. Cute, right? I crocheted the hat for him, and had planned to get him a brown shirt from Goodwill and stitch the white lacing on it using felt, but then I found a cuter idea that would also be more practical (at least in the short term…): a crocheted bag. That sounds overly simplistic, but that’s really all it is. I modified a pattern I found online to make the bag look like the center part of a football, with the lacing down the middle. The white band on the top of the football was included as part of his hat, and the band along the bottom I’d intended to accomplish by putting some masking tape around the bottom of his brown pants, but I forgot. So he only had the top band. The bag went around his head like a necklace, so it looked like his midsection was the front of the football. Bonus: He got to carry his own candy.

Munchkin went as Snidely Whiplash from the Dudley Do-Right cartoons. He and Seahawk received a packet of mustache temporary tattoos at their birthday party, and when he laid eyes on the handlebar one, he knew he wanted to go as a “bad guy” for Halloween using that mustache. I showed him a picture of Snidely online, and he agreed that that was the specific bad guy he wanted to be. He wore all black clothes (which he already owned), a top hat we got for pretty inexpensive from Wal-Mart, a cape I made for him using black fabric with ribbon for the ties (this was about a 30-minute job to make), and the mustache. Easy peasy.

It could be argued that Seahawk’s costume broke our “rules.” He went as a Seattle Seahawks football player. They’re his absolute favorite sports team (that’s right: sports team, not just football team), which is why his blog name is Seahawk. A few days before his birthday, Will took the boys to Big 5 sporting goods store to look around, and Seahawk fell in love with something he found there: a Seahawks helmet and jersey combo pack. He got enough birthday money to purchase it, so that’s just what he did the next day. With that purchase, he changed his mind on his costume (he was planning to go as Sherlock Holmes, so he could “catch” Munchkin’s Snidely Whiplash – don’t ask, considering they’re different universes). We’ll put the Sherlock idea in our hip pocket for next year.

What did your kids (or you) wear for a Halloween costume?

Blessings,

Wendy