First-year parenting decisions set your family expectations. Especially with holiday celebrations where snap decisions snowball into lifetime traditions in the blink of a Christmas tree light.
This week I’m breathing a sigh of relief because of an important Halloween decision my wife Jenny and I made: we’re a store-bought costume household. Aggressively so.
We’ll still have problems, sure. We already had to find supplemental leggings to make my daughter’s Snow White costume compatible with an outdoor party.
But if I continue playing my cards right, my future will have no face-painting panic attacks, no split- seam meltdowns, and no frantic trips to Goodwill trying to find clothes we can cut holes into.
We’re outsourcing our Halloween costume anxiety to qualified professionals. I love pop-up Halloween stores; it’s nice when carnies can come off the road for a few weeks to rest inside a former Radio Shack.
The National Retail Federation predicts $8.8 billion will be spent on Halloween this year, with $3.2 billion being spent on costumes for kids, pets, and adults. It appears that the era of homemade costumes is over.
This couldn’t come at a better time for me, a new parent just stepping back into the Halloween costume arena after a decades-long absence.
In college, I regularly put on a windbreaker and baseball cap and called myself an umpire. When people told me it didn’t count as a costume, I’d bump them with my belly and eject from the party. It was a cop-out sure, but it got me through all four years without misallocating a penny of my precious beer money.
For anyone reading this in a fit of indignation, please, by all means continue making your own costume if you’re going to be creative. But you aren’t. You’re going to plagiarize an idea from Pinterest, which has all the creativity of a paint-by-number.
The only difference between a store-bought Halloween costume and a Pinterest-inspired costume is the number of items in your Amazon cart.
Plus there’s now the amplification of social media. After all, if you didn’t post a picture of your costume, did you even really wear one?
Social media also escalates the consequences for homemade costumes that don’t come together well. At least three costumes throughout my childhood easily could’ve been included in costume fail compilations.
(For those who don’t know, fail compilations are where predatory social media marketers republish humiliating pictures of children for their own profit and enjoyment.)
My first costume fail was dressing as a kangaroo in Kindergarten.
Mom sewed me a saggy brown costume complete with a pouch for a toy kangaroo I had that hopped when you squeezed it.
It wasn’t until we were lining up for the costume parade that I realized this made me a girl kangaroo.
The obvious play was to swap the pouch for boxing gloves, which I clearly should’ve needed in 1985 after getting on the school bus as a kangaroo with a pouch.
The next costume fail came a few years later when mom put a plastic cheerleader’s pom-pom on my head and called me one of the McDonald’s Fry Guys, even though I just looked like a kid with a pom-pom on his head. I just had to go along with it as if I didn’t want to be a Ghostbuster.
After that, I got to pick out my costume and chose a store-bought Freddy Kreuger glove. However, I didn’t own anything remotely resembling a striped sweater so I went in a polo shirt as if everyone’s nightmares suddenly took place on casual Friday.
I’m very fortunate to have been raised as the youngest child in a time where cameras still used film, and taking more than one picture of anything was considered a waste of money. Just like store-bought Halloween costumes.
It’s amazing how times change.
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