Happy Halloween!

For some reason I can't explain, I am a huge proponent of homemade Halloween costumes.  Well, that's not quite accurate: I can explain it, but my explanation doesn't really translate into any innate skill in costume construction, yet I still insist on doing it.  You see, I really like Halloween.  I like the dressing up, of course, but I really like the food and the parties and, most of all, the kids in their costumes, especially their homemade costumes.  So for almost all of my boys' lives, I have made their Halloween costumes.  Which sounds very impressive, until you realize that I don't actually sew all that much, I'm not really all that creative when it comes right down to it, and my craft ideas always, ALWAYS exceed my craft talents, which are limited at best.  Recently, however, I discovered the art of the hoodie costume, the costume made out of a glorified, gussied-up sweatsuit, and I have taken that idea and run with it, for several years, with relative success, I think, although you can be the judge.  And even before that, I have always been a big fan of simple costumes made out regular clothes.  See some examples from the past and pictures of this year's costumes:

J's first Halloween!

J's second Halloween (I had a super-hero mask too but it melted).

Not Halloween but definitely our kind of costume.

E's first Halloween (I forget what the husband
was...a tomato? a strawberry??).

My little mummy (there are sweat pants under there).

E was something this year but stripped off all the costume
parts before we even started trick-or-treating!

Shhhhh!

Again, it's a t-shirt.

Dragon hoodie and E "who-ing my who!"

Bat and whale shark, my best work so far!

Here we are trick-or-treating last year.  Notice the
reappearance of the dragon costume on our neighbor
friend.  I love sharing!

Which brings us to this year.  My poor kids: I always make them tell me their ideas far in advance, and I get final approval (based on what I deem possible given my minimal talents).  This year I made them both tell me what they wanted to be for Halloween over the summer, so I could assemble the pieces and gather materials while we were in the States if necessary.  Luckily, they had fairly easy wishes this time around.  I was able to find a t-shirt hoodie for J (it is far too hot for sweatsuits around here) since he wanted to be a dinosaur (very similar to the dragon) with red and green spikes.  Why these colors?  Who knows??  E wanted to be a robot...then a robot dinosaur, which seemed a bit more challenging...but when we finally got down to making the costume and looking at pics on Pinterest, he went back to a plain old robot.  Hooray!  Cardboard boxes and the recyclables I have been collecting since we came here, and gray paint I knew just where to find, miraculously.

Of course, trick-or-treating this year was complicated.  First, they don't really celebrate Halloween here, it being A, a holiday with Pagan and Christian origins, and B, all about magic and witches and ghosts, which are taboo in these parts.  Second, even though the Westerners in our compound did organize trick-or-treating and our friend graciously invited us to her compound as well, we couldn't take part because Halloween falls on a Friday this year...which is the Sabbath for us around here.  Luckily, we did have a Halloween party carnival at church on Thursday, so the boys were able to dress up, show off, and amass some candy via fun games and booths.  I actually liked not having to make a costume that the boys had to take on and off by themselves multiple times like they have had to do in the past, what with school and church parties and Halloween itself.  For our private celebration tonight, we closed our doors and turned off the lights so no one would knock on our door and instead stayed in and watched Halloween-themed cartoons and had a candle-lit apple slice dipping bar: apple slices on sticks dipped in chocolate, white chocolate, and/or caramel sauce and then dipped again in any or all of the following: graham cracker crumbs, a cinnamon sugar mixture, grated coconut, chocolate chips, mini marshmallows, toffee bits (crushed Werther's candies), or Halloween sprinkles (I brought those with me).  We also had our favorite yummy pumpkin soup to round out a fun and festive evening.

Robot and dinosaur.  Our robot lives by the code
that more is more in buttons!

There was face painting!

You can barely see his spikes here....

Yep, those were our costumes, very low maintenance!