This was always one of my favorite holidays when I was little. I mean, what kid doesn't want free candy?? (hint: the answer is none). My mom would always decorate our house with spiderwebs, pumpkins, and other random "scary" things. She even bought a CD of spooky sounds and would put the stereo speaker in the window so kids coming to the door could hear it. #BestMomEver
When I was about 6 years old, we moved to our brand new house in a lovely community. Our neighborhood was awesome, and back then, it was safer for kids to trick-or-treat without their parents tagging along. My mom still went through our candy when we dragged our pillowcases stuffed with treats back home, but she didn't really worry about us walking around our neighborhood by ourselves. Those were the days.
I was supposed to be a cat (you can't see the ears or furry tail in this picture, but they were there!) and my bother... well, he was a clown. C didn't want to be a clown, can't you tell?
Ok. Here's the story. Mom asked us early on what we wanted to be for Halloween. I had successfully been a cat for the past three years and decided, why quit a good thing? C said he wanted to be a pirate. We had all the stuff for my cat costume and mom bought C his pirate costume. Come Halloween afternoon, C decided he no longer wanted to be a pirate. He wanted to be a superhero. It was kinda late to find him a superhero costume, and he refused to wear the pirate stuff my mom had already bought. He had two options: wear the clown costume from last year or stay home and hand out candy with Mom. There was no way he was giving up the handfuls of tooth decaying sweets our neighbors gave out, and begrudgingly donned the clown suit. Despite Mom's best efforts to make him a happy clown, his heartbreaking disappointment at not being a superhero still shines through. He was happily a pirate for the next year, and I finally exchanged the cat ears for a witch hat.
A couple years ago Mom's husband made us calendars for Christmas. Each one was personalized with photos of our family and funny captions. This photo was in mine for the month of October. I showed this page to C and we just laughed at the documentation of one of the few times he was overly dramatic as a child (I was a very dramatic preteen).
What was your go-to costume as a kid?
