Did you make your own Halloween costumes when you were a kid, or did your parents spring for one of those boxed costumes with the plastic mask held on by elastic and a scratchy, crinkly plastic outfit?
Oh, how I wanted one of those boxed costumes when I was a kid! Grand Value, which was our local five and dime kind of store on Covert Avenue in Floral Park, would convert the WHOLE back wall into a big Halloween costume array. The store had been a supermarket, and you know how high the ceilings are in old supermarkets? Yeah, that high….piled five, six, 10 or 20 deep with box after box of Halloween costumes!
In the 1970s, that meant Land of the Lost and other Sid & Marty Kroft characters from the Saturday morning cartoons…and super heroes, of course. Wonder Woman. Spider Man. Bat Man.
Then, as if that wasn’t enough, the Halloween aisle, where they had the hated back to school items just weeks before, simply oozed with possibilities. Fake vampire fangs. Kits to make blood, gore and fake flesh. Frankenstein hands and witches hats and pitchforks….
And you know what I was for Halloween each year?
Whatever my sister had been at that age.
Yes, we had a box of old costumes in the attic…next to the box of old bathing suits. The attic actually had two big boxes in the center aisle (we had a walk-in attic). Both were old washing machine boxes and they were BIG. The one closest to the window had the beach things: the old beach towels with the Coppertone girl on them, those awful bathing caps we had to wear at the Floral Park pool, and old bathing suits galore that smelled of chlorine and were scratchy, stiff and worn out. Many of them were from the neighbors up the street who had six girls; we got boxes of their hand-me-down clothes for years. Most of my dresses had made the rounds of kindergarten first with that family, then with my older sister, then with me. Same with the bathing suits; each spring, my mom would send us to the attic to rummage through the box and find something that possibly fit. Then bingo! Bathing suit!
The next box held Halloween costumes. There was a fluffy white bunny suit that I wore when I was four. My sister had an old dress of my grandmother’s, and that became our old lady costume. We added a wig from Grand Value, an old purse of my grandmother’s and a cane. Bingo! Instant costume!
One year I wanted to go as Scarlett O’Hara. I had a fascination with Gone with the Wind; I saw the movie on TV and read the book cover to cover. My sister loved to sew, and she was (and is today) incredibly creative. She decided to make my costume.
But we had no money. So we did the next best thing…we improvised.
For fabric, she used old sheets. We dyed them purple, my favorite color. They came out more of a magenta color, but no matter. We had the yardage we needed.
Hoop skirts were a bit of a problem. My sister had a book out of the library which said that they used whalebone for hoops, but whales are a bit in short supply when you are 11 years old and living on Long Island. So we found a big spool of thick wire in my dad’s box of miscellaneous wire under his workbench. With some tugging and cutting and snipping here and there, the wire made a fine hoop for my hoop skirt.
And so I became Scarlet O’Hara!
Another year, I found an old bridesmaid’s dress in the attic, decorated it with strings of beads and pearls, and went to my freshman high school Halloween dance as Scheherazade. Another time, I used makeup and a plastic bowler hat to transform my look into Boy George.
Homemade Halloween costumes were the best. A friend of the family dressed in blue denim jeans and jean jacket. He put stripes of yellow tape up and down the front and back and taped Matchbox cars to himself. What was his costume? “The Long Island Expressway,” he said, naming a major highway back where I used to live.
Another friend donned sweatpants and t-shirt, then stepped into a big Hefty trash bag in which he’d cut arm and leg holes. He had his mother and sister tape empty boxes and bags to him. What was he? “A bag of garbage.”
I don’t see any trick or treaters now where I live in the countryside. Kids can’t walk the country roads. They go into the towns for trick or treating. Before I moved from Long Island, though, Halloween remained one of my favorite holidays. I know that some people don’t celebrate it and I respect that, but I find it all in good fun.
I never did get one of those store bought costumes. When we helped my father in law clean out his house before he moved in with us, we found boxes from my husband’s childhood in the basement, and there were boxes from his store bought costumes. A devil. Casper the Friendly Ghost. My little nephew who was four at the time put on the mask and pretended to scare us, jumping out from behind the basement banister rail and making noises that sounded like a dog throwing up but were probably meant to be a ghost.
“I always wanted one of those,” I said wistfully as we packed away the old costumes for my nephew to take home and destroy, er, play with.
“Ugh! I hated those!” my husband said. “They were always so hot and itchy. I wanted to make my own costume, but my mom bought us those.”
You see? No matter what you had as a kid, you always wanted what you didn’t have!
Today, I don’t like dressing up in costume, but I suppose that’s just part of growing up.
I still like Halloween candy, though.
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| One of my former cats with a Halloween pumpkin. |
How do you like Throwback Thursday and these little memories I share? Let me know in the comment box, below, and whether you had a homemade costume….or one of those boxed ones!
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