Halloween Teaser and memory lane

All the festivities are this weekend so the better pictures will be next week, but I do have a little teaser. We went to a Halloween activity a couple weeks ago and here are this year's costumes.

(poorly lit pictures I took with my phone)




Sophia as a pumpkin.





AJ as Harry Potter. Easiest costume ever. I found the choir robe at DI and just hemmed it to fit him. The pumpkin outfit was also found at DI. Best $3 I ever spent!

I feel like costumes are harder to put together now then when I was a kid. When we were younger we didn't really plan far in advance what we were going to be. It was usually the week of Halloween or even that night that we would dig out the costume box and kind of rotate a few standard costumes. I was a clown on at least 3 separate occasions (back before clowns were creepy). We had a doctor outfit with jacket and stethoscope. We had a couple of random wigs that we could just kind of modify an outfit with. Good times.

I have a couple of Halloween's engraved in my memory - (since no one thought to document these events, I have no photo evidence).

When I was 10 I got to be a princess. I was so excited about this costume. My mom made it and it was beautiful. I had a pretty wand, so I guess that made me a fairy princess. I went trick or treating with my sister Eliza and her friend Deanna. They were hookers (I think that was the year Pretty Woman came out). I remember my mom didn't want Eliza to wear her outfit, so I had to figure out why. That was when I learned what the word Hooker meant.

The main thing I remember about that Halloween was that it was cold. My mom made me wear a coat and I was so mad because I was covering up my pretty dress. I'm pretty sure I left it unzipped for most of the night. That was the famous Halloween Blizzard of 1991. (Well, famous if you lived in Minnesota.) We got 28 inches of snow that night. And I was wearing a dress. It was so cold, but we would do anything for free candy!

Speaking of candy.

The other Halloween memory I have was probably a year or two after that blizzard. My sisters were too old to go trick or treating so they sent me as the sacrificial candy gatherer. I had to go alone and once I went around the block once, they sent me back out in a different costume to go around again. (That's why it's handy to have a costume box) The only problem was we lived in a small town and small neighborhood where everyone knew everyone else. All the neighbors recognized me the first time I went around. And the second time I definitely got some weird looks. Or at least I interpreted them as weird since I was so embarrassed to be knocking on every one's door a second time in a different costume.

What's your favorite Halloween memory?