Stone Soup by Jan Eliot for October 28, 2014

Better not be “Despicable Me” minions as depicted a few days ago in “Zack Hill.”

Girls…isn’t it awful late to be asking your full-time working Mom to make costumes for you?! Try being a bum…that is relatively easy; a ghost, of course; Zorro, for sure! Use your imagination, Holly and Alix! ;)

One of you: go as a big black blizzard cloud. The other: go as a blizzard.

How about as striking workers because management did not fill your every need. Or how about using the cap and sheet as diapers cry your way around the neighborhood. Oops, bad idea that would be too close to your reality.

From Addams Family movie: “A serial killer. They can look like anyone.”

Why not wear your mom’s old clothes girls. My daughter did.

One year I made two large “pillow cases” from brown cloth and a bunch of felt squares. One girl went as a calculator and the other cut and stuffed circles of different colors and was a bag of M&M’s. I think the whole shebang was under $5 – but this was the mid-70s.

Have you ever looked at what is available for purchase? There are almost no modest teen costumes available. I have already told my ten year old that we will be making her costumes once she hits that age.

Oh boy.

Black cape and white sheet — how about a hockey puck and marshmallow?

uh oh

Go as Freddy from “Nightmare on Elm Street.” Or put white make-up on your face with black something-or-other around your eyes, wrap yourself in the white sheet, run out in front of a police car and go “Woogie boogie boogie!”

By the time my kids were 10 they were mostly making their own costumes. I might help, by driving them around to thrift stores or doing some simple sewing.

My kids had some really different costumes. One year two of them went as Groucho and Harpo Marx. On year one of my daughters, who was about 10-11, decided to go as what she said was the scariest thing she could think of. . . an IRS agent. My son was the Aflack Duck one year. Our church had a Bible-themed costume contest and one daughter dressed as Jonah AFTER the fish spit him out, with seaweed and a couple of dead fish.

Just recently my youngest, who is now 19, said she always wanted one of the costumes with the plastic masks from Wal-Mart.

The good old days.