Dear readers,
Halloween is just about one month away and we have been preparing for our favorite time of the year for a few months now. We are featuring some of our favorite bloggers who will share tips & tricks to finding the perfect thrifted Halloween costume. Today we feature Wendy from the Simple Thrift blog in New Hampshire.
Thrifted Halloween: Inspiring Costume Creativity
I grew up in a family of 7 children. Although we were not poor by any stretch of the imagination, with all those kids, my mother found that she always had to watch where the money was going.
Which is why I can’t ever remember having a store bought Halloween costume. What I do remember however is our “Halloween Box” – a large cardboard box that was kept in the attic and brought downstairs during the third week of October. In it were cast offs from my mother, father and older siblings. There were scarves, jackets and hats. Sheets too worn to mend anymore just aching to be ripped into shreds for a mummy. Inside the box was a world of imagination.
The box also had other objects, a wiffle bat, an old tennis racket, a parasol pink and made from paper.
“If you can’t make a costume from what’s in the box,” my mother would tell us, “then you don’t deserve to go trick or treating.”
I remember my childhood Halloween costumes. One time I was an old time paper boy, complete with rolled up pants for knickers, a white button down shirt, my grandfather’s suspenders and a day old newspaper to carry.
Another time I was a person being eaten by a shark. From a piece of cardboard, I cut out a large figure of a shark, which I then taped onto an old blue sweatshirt and wearing it upside down so my legs seemed to come out of the monster’s mouth.
What a great costume, I heard over and over and over.
Never once did I bemoan the fact that we didn’t get store bought costumes. To me those were cheap, lacked creativity, and were an easy way out. Why wear a plastic mask on your face when you could create a realistic character using some of your mom’s discarded makeup?
Halloween is coming and soon my 6 kids will be begging me to take down our Halloween Box. I’ve put in it a few additions collected since last Halloween from yard sales and from Goodwill visits. This year there’s a sparkly prom dress, a pointy witch’s hat, a football jersey, and an old fashioned bathing cap covered with multicolored plastic flowers.
My kids will dive through the costumes remembering the all important rule – “if you can’t make a costume from what’s in the box, then you don’t deserve to go trick or treating” and I will get to admire the sheer enthusiasm and beauty of my kids’ creativity unleashed.
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Wendy Thomas is an award winning journalist, columnist, and blogger who believes that taking challenges in life will always lead to goodness. She is the mother of 6 funny and creative kids and it is her goal to teach them through stories and lessons.
Wendy’s current project involves writing about her family’s experiences with chickens (yes, chickens). Visit Wendy’s blog, Simple Thrift.
New guest blog post from @WendyENThomas! What inspires your Halloween costume creativity? http://t.co/ueoChEVC