How I spend my Halloween

The topic of how I have spent my Halloween has changed throughout the years.

In the early years, back in the 1970s, we used to get cheap plastic costumes that would get damaged with the slightest movement or brush against something. These costumes were really horrible. There was a plastic mask that wouldn’t let you breathe, let alone see. The plastic jumpsuit would never last through a night of trick-or-treating. Actually I was lucky to get out of the house intact.

Then, sometime in the eighties, the costume, which I had picked out and looked forward to wearing, in fact, got torn terribly at a pre-Halloween party. Therefore I was out of a costume to go door to door and get all the goodies, which I had been dreaming about for weeks. I was extremely bummed out at not being able to go out and do the traditional trick-or-treating. I was convinced by my stepmother to use a white bathrobe and stockings (pantyhose), among a few other assortments and homemade props to cobble together a costume so that I didn’t miss out on all the excitement. When I say excitement, I mean the overload of sugar in which each child wants. It took a lot of convincing for me to leave the house in “stockings”, even though nobody had the slightest clue that they were pieces of female clothing. That year I went as Luke Skywalker from the first movie.

Fast forward to my adult life, I do not get dressed up or actively participate in a lot of Halloween events. I do, however, love to make props and some times entire costumes for others. It all started from that one fateful day in the early eighties. It all started very small. It would usually be only a small piece that would go together with the costume. Often it was, in fact, a lightsaber, a gun or something like that. I gradually moved up to larger props for larger costumes and larger people. It started simply with adding pieces onto existing elements to produce a final product. One year I wanted to make a jetpack for a Star Wars costume. Therefore, that year I made a full replica of the Jango Fett Geonosioan Arena jet-pack for my son’s costume.

I felt that that was too easy, so the next year I decided that I was going to go bigger. I decided to make an entire Optimus Prime costume from scratch. This costume took about a month to finish as the hardest part was my son was in the middle of a growth spurt. So I proceeded to make the entire costume by hand, which also included the paint work and such. That year he won first place in a costume contest. He was so happy about that, but it was strange to him because every kid, even the girls, wanted to touch the costume because they all said it looked so real.

The next year I made him an Obi-Wan Kenobi costume from the Clone Wars series. It was done all by hand, and this time I needed to do stitching which isn’t exactly my strong suit. However, he wasn’t able to attend any Halloween parties that year. The following year he asked me to make him into Link from The Legend of Zelda. I proceeded to make that entire costume by hand, except for the boots. I’m not a shoemaker. On a side note, as I was making his costume I was making a prop for a friend. That prop landed me in the emergency room. This was in fact not my first nor my last trip there.

Anyway, I usually spend my Halloweens on the sidelines. I prefer to be a spectator than an attendee.

Kevin

Vocabulary
goodies (n) – candy, snacks, sweets, etc.
bummed out (idiom) - to not be happy about something
stepmother (n) - a woman that your father marries after his marriage to or relationship with your mother has ended
from scratch (idiom) - from a point at which nothing has been done yet
growth spurt (n phr.) - an occurrence of growing quickly and suddenly in a short period of time
on the sidelines (idiom) – observing, rather than taking part in something