Halloween Hangover

The Halloween Hangover is that morning-after feeling you have when you spent the night before traipsing around the neighborhood with some assortment of heavily costumed children hyped up on candy or the anticipation thereof. My children are all, at least chronologically, mostly grown, but there were years and years when the planning started in August and the recovery period lasted until the week before Thanksgiving.

Today, though, I've got nothing much to recover from other than wandering aimlessly around the internet admiring the costumes other people have come up with for their children and remembering some adventures in costuming from Halloweens past. We were pretty big into homemade(ish) costumes when my kids were younger, largely for budgetary reasons but also because the kids seemed to have a good time with it.

I was terrible at remembering to take pictures, worse at getting the film developed and even worse at organizing the pictures that did manage to become prints. Even so (and due mostly to Little Sister's superior organization skills), there are shots of most of the costumes around somewhere, but one year I didn't manage to get pictures of was the year I dressed all three boys as crayons.*

Son-One was five, Son-Two was almost four and Son-Three was two. I bought three sheets of poster board at like 59 cents a piece, a package of pointy party hats for a dollar and three tubes of face paint at about a dollar each. Made kid-sized tubes with the poster boards decorated to look like a crayon label, used coordinating paint on each kid's face and wrapped the party hats in coordinating construction paper for the point of the crayon. I dressed three kids for Halloween and spent just a little over $5 and the kids were instantly recognizable as crayons and looked absolutely adorable.

In my haste to pat myself on the back, I didn't immediately realize how gravely I had overestimated the flexibility of the poster board each child was wrapped in. It began to dawn on me as I watched the three boys making mincing little Geisha steps as they walked down the sidewalk, but it wasn't until they were trying to walk up the porch steps of neighborhood houses and were unable to fully bend their knees that it hit me that I had made the perfect Halloween costumes for standing completely still.

As penance for my lack of foresight, I spent the next two hours lifting them one by one up and down porch after porch after porch.

Everything worked out in the end, though--2500 calories of pilfered "fun size" candy bars later, I was practically in a diabetic coma and that ache in my lower back was nothing but a hazy memory.

*Little Sister was living halfway across the country (in Texas) that year. I say we blame her.