Halloween Back in the Day

In today’s world you can purchase a costume complete and with no creativity for Halloween in Party City, department stores and online, i.e. Oriental Trading or HalloweenCostumes.com.  The prices for these costumes are outrageous.  An infant costume can start at $35 and go as high as $100.  So over-inflated; but that’s because people buy it all and don’t bat an eye.

What happened to creativity?  Let me tell you back in the 50’s there was no such thing as pre-made costumes.  You had to be innovative and come up with ideas for your costumes.  Sure we had pre-made masks with a flimsy little one piece costume.  They were simple little face masks that you wrapped around your head with a stretchy rubber thingy (see what I mean on the left).   As far as the rest of the costume it was pretty much your own ingenuity that made up the rest.

This is a photo of my kids in the 1970’s.  Paul (in the middle) was the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, Nicki  (top right) was Wonder Woman and Arthur (front right) was The Incredible Hulk.  They would (and we parents too) would use their imagination and come up with some pretty great costumes.  If I remember correctly the kid in the top left corner was Stephen from around the corner and he was Elvis. Can’t say I remember or recognize the two with the masks (one head behind Arthur).

The Adults Get Creative

When I was married we had a group of friends, six or seven couples, that would go out pretty much every weekend together.  One of the guys, Steve Petilli (God rest his soul) was the biggest prankster on the face of the earth.  Every Halloween he would have a Halloween Party at his house.  Steve would set up the basement as a spooky room where he would hang spiders, skeletons, webs and whatever else he could think up.  He would take us down there and try to scare us. It got old after a few parties.

We would try to think of costumes that we could wear as a couple.  Some of them were pretty creative.  One year my dearly departed friends Lorraine and Ciro came up with a doozy.  Now take a closer look…Lorraine is the groom and Ciro is the bride.  They cracked us up.  As for me and my ex-husband, we were pretty creative ourselves.  One year we dressed as Liza Minelli and Joel Grey from Cabaret and we used only the stuff we had around.  The only things we purchased were the hats.  Jeez I was so nice and thin and I thought I was fat.

Steve got pretty creative with his costumes too for the parties.  If I could I would post a photo of one of his costumes, but it would be X-rated.

Couldn’t the parents today get a little more creative instead of wearing superhero costumes and Disney characters.  How many of you remember some costumes you wore growing up?  Or maybe when you were first married?  I bet you can recall a few unique costumes you conjured up.  Wasn’t it fun trying to figure out something to wear to the next Halloween Party?  Or maybe like some of my crazy friends, dress up with the kids to go trick or treating?  Why is everything so complicated and expensive now?