I really do like Halloween. I like all holidays that involve family celebrations, no gift exchanges and chocolate. I suppose that technically we “exchange” small gifts with the neighborhood, but I’ll let that slide. But in the costume department… eh, well… I am not so great.
When I was small, my mother would sit for days hunched over her sewing machine. She made all of my costumes, and a lot of my clothes (and curtains, and all sorts of other clever fabric craftyness). I remember going to the fabric store, wandering amongst towering bolts of fabric (I was about 4. Everything seemed to tower), pressing my face against the fancy fabrics, smelling the poly blends, hot sewing machine oil and dust. I remember looking at the tracing paper puzzle pieces, wondering how they would fit together to make the drawn picture on the packet.
One year I was a princess. The fabric for the dress was shimmery satin with an over-lay of silver star strewn sparkle netting and lots and lots of itchy, rustling crinoline underneath to give it optimum princess poof. The hat was transformed from stiff felt interfacing to a perfect cone of white with a long shimmering train of silver threaded floaty gauze. It was awesome. Another year I was a clown. I wore a polyester jumpsuit with a hula hoop sewn in the waist and pom poms around the cuffs . The dark green fabric was replete with giant white polka dots. I remember the dots were smooth, hand sized iron-ons, and not part of the fabric.
My mother would get almost as excited as I would. After a rushed dinner, she would paint my face with poster paints and we would hit the streets with a mass of other kids. There seemed to be a lot more kids trick-or-treating then, walking in herds of 25 or so, standing in line on the sidewalks to score a bit of candy. By the end of the night, my poster painted face would be aging, cracking and peeling away to reveal candy smeared pink skin.
Now I am the mom, and while I do have thread and needle, sewing machines have a habit of bursting into flames when I am near. When the kids were small, I dressed them in really cool hand-me-down, pass-around costumes from the other La Leche group kids. As they got a little older, I would pick up a few things after Halloween on deep discount, throw it in a box and let them have at it to create whatever the following Halloween.
Last year, I picked up a really cool, sufficiently poofy princess dress for $2, four sets of fairy wings (one each in green, orange, pink and purple) for 50 cents each, and a few random wands and two masks for 10 cents each. The princess dress did not make the cut this year, as it is still two sizes too big for Sarah, but one of the masks did.
Sarah is going to go as a black cat (headband with cat ears, eye-liner whiskers, black dress left over from a thrift store witch costume, black leggings and a black scarf tail). Timothy is going to go as a scare crow (pumpkin head mask, old ratty flannel donated by Aldo with raffia “straw” hand sewn on by moi, jeans and a big straw hat). I did buy the raffia and hat today… so this year’s costumes work out to about a half an hour of my time sewing “straw” along the cuffs and holes and $7 cash money. Not too bad for “home-made”! The kids seem nearly as excited as I used to get 
