For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for October 27, 2013

There’s no point in making your kid a costume unless you actually ask them what they want to be for Halloween first. You can make the coolest, most accurate Sherlock Holmes costume ever, but it’s all for nothing if your son wants to be Iron Man. I love making my kids’ costumes every year, but I make sure they are as excited about it as I am FIRST.

Little ingrate!!

He’ll appreciate it when he’s older.

My first Halloween. Wore a sheet over my coat with a plastic Donald Duck mask over my face. It snowed. Had mud all over my sheet. Another year, my mom fixed me up with a great home-made, all-black Zorro outfit. Best I can remember.

Woo-hoo! Tacky grandmabrag alert – last night the creator of my avatar (who drew it on the computer shortly before or after her sixth birthday – she’s eleven now) won first prize for the best costume among the oldest age group at the annual Halloween skate at our village Lions Club hall (Wisconsin). She wore a black capelike thing, a silly chicken head, and sunglasses. As a pièce de résistance, she carried a fake foot with bloody ankle that she’d gotten at a Dollar Tree the previous week. The foot was a big hit with the younger kiddies, who kept touching it, and a younger boy who fought it with his light saber. (She has assured me that the thing won’t turn her into a mass murderer.)

When I was a kid, we thought only the poor people had to where home made costumes… And too, my mother was not very creative at all.

If in doubt..be a pirate

Halloween is supoosed to be fun, if the kid don’t share the enthusiasm and participate. Then this is no fun at all for either parent or kid.

My first Halloween, probably age 4 or 5, my mother cut two eye holes in a pillow case and put it over my head. It scared me to death, I have always been claustrophobic. She declared that I was no fun and I decided she was nuts.

I was always excited about Halloween costumes and would plan for months it seemed to come up with a good one-one year my mom and I came up with the best horse outfit and I loved it.

I intend to NEVER buy the cheap plastic costumes. Even the “well done” ones are pathetic. Sure they’re good for the average person. But I’m into sewing and costume making. My son is 1-year-old so I get to pick what he is this year (and I spent a month making it and paying attention to every detail, course I’m also a slow sewer lol) but in future I’ll ask him and then make it. He’ll have the best, most accurate costumes every year. And I’ll make him any costume he wants year-round too, not just for Halloween.

I used to use charcoal on my face saved money that way and who cares how you look

Dated cartoon, and yet, Sherlock is back to bein’ cool again.(But then, when WASN’T Sherlock Holmes cool?)

And the moral is, “Ask the kid what costume they want before going to all the effort.”

I used to love the smell of the plastic masks when we opened the costume boxes. It’s like Pavlov’s dogs….plasticy smell meant buckets of candy were thisclose to being reality.

I made costumes when my kids were growing up. Now that they are 18 and up, if they need a costume they make their own. I am now left with only my yorkies to make costumes for. This year they are going to be Little Red Riding Hood and The Big Bad Wolf (dressed as grandma.)

My 18 & 19 year olds want to be Zombie Disney Princesses this year. Yuck.

Looks like Sherlock Holmes stole the 10th Doctor’s clothes ;)

I’m glad to say that my kids appreciated my work (partly because when they were that age, THEY HELPED.

Best ‘grown-up’ Halloween costume ever – wear normal clothes; carry a sign reading “Nudist On Strike”!