What I love most about Halloween is the permission to dress up. This is especially true for kids, but even adults can get away with it, especially if they're parents coordinating with their kids. When I was growing up in the 1980's, Halloween was one day. You chose a costume. In my case my mom then slaved over a sewing machine for quite a few evenings making said costume. You wore it a school on October 31st for the Halloween parade. You went out into your neighborhood that evening and trick or treated. Then it was over.
Over the years, Halloween has crept its way backwards so that at this point it has basically taken over the whole month of October. I think this is awesome, because that means there are a lot more opportunities to dress up. Squirrelboy has never loved picking a costume and dressing up on the level that I do. Every Halloween he chose a costume, often a pretty creative one, wore it on Halloween and possible to one other event, and called it good. This year, his first year in high school, he has decided that he's done with trick or treating and will stay at our house to hand out treats. I suppose it's an inevitable part of growing up, but I trick or treated through my junior year of high school, so it makes me a little sad.
Kittygirl, at 8, is nowhere near being done trick or treating, and she's a girl after my own heart when it comes to her love for costumes. She attends at least one Halloween even every weekend during October, and she wants to wear a different costume for every one. So far this month she has been Ginny Weasley (this is what she'll use on Halloween), a black cat, Anne of Green Gables, and Squirrel Girl. This is costume week at gymnastics, and this afternoon she'll go as an elf in the following ensemble:
Mr. Engineer is even less into dressing up than Squirrelboy, but we've managed to talk him into participating in a handful of family costumes. The two main ones were the two years we attended Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party at Disney World. The first time was ten years ago when Squirrelboy was 4 and Kittygirl was just a dream. Squirrelboy was obsessed with a Playhouse Disney (now known as Disney Junior) show called My Friends Tigger and Pooh. In the show, Pooh and Tigger run a detective agency with a little girl named Darby. They call themselves the Super Sleuths. In my version of the backstory, Darby is Christopher Robin's daughter, but that's actually mentioned in the show. We found a Tigger costume at a consignment sale and added a t-shirt from Goodwill with the Super Sleuth symbol on it. Yet again, with the help of Goodwill, I found a yellow outfit I could turn into a Pooh costume for Mr. Engineer, again with a secondhand Tshirt with the Super Sleuth symbol. Darby was the easiest. I just had to find some clothes that resembled her typical outfit. Everyone knew who we were and it was a ton of fun.
On our second visit to Mickey's party, Kittygirl was four and Squirrelboy was six. That year we veered from the Disney theme and had two pairs of historical literary characters. Kittygirl and I went as Mary and Caroline Ingalls, thanks to my mom's great seamstress skills. Mr. Engineer and Squirrelboy's costumes need a bit more of an explanation. There's an amazing series of graphic novels about American history by an author named Nathan Hale entitled Nathan Hale's hazardous tales. In the first book, the spy Nathan Hale is on the gallows and speaks his famous last words, "I regret that I have but one life to give for my country." In doing so, he inserts himself into the history book, quite literally. The gallows turns into a big history book, swallows him up, and spits him back out having imparted the knowledge all future American history to him. The rest of the series is Nathan Hale telling the hangman stories from American history to delay his execution. They're amazing, especially for reluctant readers including dyslexics who can read but get overwhelmed by a lot of text on the page (see there, I DID tie this into the theme for the month :)). Squirrelboy, of course, dressed as Nathan Hale and Mr. Engineer went as the hangman.
The one thing I do not love about Halloween is spending large amounts of money on costumes. Given that Kittygirl wears anywhere from 4-8 costumes every October you might presume that that's exactly what I do, but you would be wrong. I limit the costume buying to one costume per year, and everything else needs to be pulled together with things we already own. This year for Kitty girl I bought a red wig (actually intended as an Anna wig from Frozen II) and that was all. To be Ginny Weasley Kittygirl is adding the wand we bought at Universal Orlando this summer and a Gryffindor robe Squirrelboy wore to be Harry Potter at her age (that year, incidentally, was the best sibling match year ever - two year old Kittygirl was a Hogwarts owl). The cat ears and tale are from her costume bin, bought cheaply one year after Halloween. She used the red wig and wore an old fashioned looking dress to be Anne. Squirrel Girl was accomplished with a brown dress, brown boots, a furry brown best, and squirrel ears and tale that were Squirrelboy's main costume a couple years ago.
I've always loved Halloween and dressing up. However, it has taken on even more meaning during my years of parenting, and especially during my struggles parenting kids with invisible disabilities. Halloween, and the whole Halloween season, is one more opportunity to seize joy and to help my children have beautiful memories of their childhoods even amid the struggles they've also had.
These two memes sum up my attitude really well. I don't always do it as well as I usually do in October, but I want to not let our challenges make me or my children bitter. A big part of doing this is to choose joy.
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