In my house they’re busy with the sewing machine. Bobbins are flying about as witches’ capes are readied. I’m dodging sewing needles and thread shooting from the machine like spider’s webs. It’s a homemade Halloween hootenanny.
And I love it.
We always made our costumes as kids. Maybe it’s because we were poor. Or maybe it’s because we were creative. Or both. Better to be creatively poor, than poorly creative, I always say.
But there was something exciting about coming up with your own costume. That you could scrape the depths of your imagination, then the depths of boxes of junk, to conjure up an idea — from the doable (Spanish Moss Man) to the impossible (a life size Statue of Liberty with lit torch and huddled masses of immigrants milling about.)
Moldy, mildewed, paint-stained sheets from the garage became ghosts. (And the reason for a week’s worth of asthma attacks.) Lego blocks could be glued to shirts and pants to create … what else? … a tub of Legos.
Why purchase boxed-up costumes from “Star Wars” when we could make our own, and look just as pathetic as the other kids?
We were astronauts and Indians and cowboys and accountants and once something totally conceptual that involved 82 rolls of aluminum foil and hair curlers. I’m telling you, my brother and I liked to push the envelope.
A homemade costume was how we left our mark … literally … especially if we were covered in some kind of body paint or grease, then leaned up against a doorway or a column.
For years we could bike by houses and remark, “Hey, that black smudge is from the time I went as an airline mechanic” or “that’s from the year I was a washed-up alcoholic.”
Sometimes our costumes were a bit embarrassing, cumbersome and even dangerous. We could barely see out of our outfits, and someone had to guide us about the neighborhood, steering us away from trees and busy intersections. We were constantly being fished out of water-filled drainage ditches.
And we often overheated in our bulky, un-ventilated suits. By the end of the night, parts of our bodies had lost all circulation and gone completely numb. As we undressed, my mother would ask: “Did you spill grape juice on your toes, or are they purple because of all that duct tape around your thighs?”
Well, it certainly wasn’t grape juice!
Major wardrobe malfunctions were a big part of the night, and they always seemed to happen at the most inopportune times. Walking up to doorways we would hear neighbors mumble, “Oh, here come the Thompson kids. I wonder what body part we’ll see this year,” or, “I’m giving you candy! Why are you flashing me?”
Pieces of costumes were always coming off. We left long trails behind us as our suits disintegrated throughout the night. We were all-but naked by the time we turned for home. Our failing costumes called for further improvisation. At the beginning of the night we were Ghostbusters with cardboard proton packs and hand-colored insignias. By the end we had evolved into robot hunchbacks who limped about the neighborhood like the walking dead, desperately trying to keep the rest of our kit together.
But while they lasted, we looked great. We always had the best looking costumes, the most original, and by far, the most flammable.
I loved that about Halloween — how it was a giant craft project, and not just a store-bought experience. I don’t know how much I realized it then, but I do now. Maybe that’s why it’s a thrill seeing my daughter dreaming up her own ideas and helping put them in action with bits of cloth and things she found at the bottoms of toy boxes.
What a thrill. Well worth dodging all those sewing needles, the risk of wardrobe malfunctions and even major losses of circulation. Ahh, so what if my toes are still purple to this day.