Friday, October 28, 2005
Page 15
AT THE SIDEBAR (Column) Halloween Becomes Less of a Treat
By J’AMY PACHECO
Is it just me, or has Halloween become more complicated in recent years?
When I was a child, we never knew in advance what we’d be for Halloween. On the big day, my siblings and I created costumes from whatever we could sneak out of Mom’s room before she got home from work. We smeared on whatever makeup we could get our hands on, and emptied our pillowcases to use as trick-or-treat bags before heading out to collect as much candy as possible.
My daughter was three when her cousins persuaded me take her trick-or-treating with them. Even then her costume was thrown together — a pink fleece zip-up footed sleeper, topped by a rabbit ear headband left from Easter. I used my eyeliner to draw whiskers and blacken a dot on her tiny nose, and voila, a tiny bunny was born.
The following year, pre-school peer pressure demanded that she have a “real” costume. So I bought some bright green felt, and whipped out a Peter Pan tunic and hat, complete with red feather.
By age five, though, no thrown-together costume would do. My petite princess wanted to be Snow White, and pronounced the pre-made costumes “too itchy.” So I made a trip to the fabric store for a pattern — a first in my Halloween history — and material in all the Snow White colors: red, light blue, dark blue, yellow and, of course, the snowiest white.
If you’ve ever noticed those fancy cutout sleeves on that legendary princess, you can probably guess that the costume took me forever. But it was worth it, for my daughter wore it everywhere, long after all the major holidays had come and gone. She was quite a sight, prancing through the local shopping mall, all princessed up.
The next year she decided to be Sleeping Beauty (in the pink dress). That dress, which I finished about five minutes before the Halloween sun went down, took forever and weighed an uncomfortable ton. She hated the blonde wig that went with it, and wore the gown exactly once.
Other princesses came and went: Tinker Bell, Beauty and the Beast’s Belle (in the red Christmas dress) and Aladdin’s Jasmine. Each year, my seasonal princess had to have a custom costume, and each year, I spent a small fortune and late nights leading up to Halloween trying to finish the costumes — one of which I had to create from a short sequence on a DVD.
When she decided to spend this Halloween as Pocahontas, I thought I was going to get a break. Although I knew I’d have to sew the costume, I exalted in the knowledge that Pocahontas’ dress is about as plain as you can get.
And then, Violet Baudelaire came along. Violet Baudelaire, you may know, is one of the characters in Lemony Snicket’s wildly popular books in the “Series of Unfortunate Events.” His latest was released two weeks before Halloween, and my daughter begged to be allowed to attend a local bookstore’s release party dressed as her favorite literary heroine.
So it was back to the fabric store, and to my collection of faux deerskin I added plum-colored fabric for a double-breasted, sailor-collared dress I had to make without a pattern. Since I have little skill in the pattern-making arena, I can honestly say it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever sewn. But I got it done, and she made a splash as Violet.
When her school principal announced students could dress for Halloween as long as they were a literary character, I realized my Violet creation would get at least one more wearing. I thought it strange that my child would, therefore, have two different Halloween costumes for a single year.
But when we attended a harvest festival at her school last weekend, my slow-growing daughter wanted to “save” her Pocahontas and Violet costumes for Halloween, and opted to dress in a re-run, as Christmas Belle from two years ago.
By the time Halloween is over this year, my daughter will have been an Indian maiden, a French country girl-turned-princess, and an orphaned inventor-in-perpetual-peril. And I’ll be exhausted.
Next year, I think I’ll skip the costume making and just go to work, leaving my closet door wide open and makeup out on the bathroom counter. It would be faster, easier, and a whole lot cheaper.
Heck, I’ll even throw in my own pillowcase. As long as it comes back — full of Halloween candy.
How could anybody complain about that?
Copyright 2005, Metropolitan News Company