Halloween Costumes to Remember

by Angela Sanford

Halloween – I remember walking through the Forces’ trailer parks in my early days, of driving to friends’ homes in Quebec, and acquiring a candied apple at my grade one teacher’s home, and of driving door to door in my later teens, but my favourite memories are of the community parties at the East Noel Hall, often organized by my mother. There were games and ghost stories, apple bobbing, and best of all was he large brown bags of goodies that each us carried home at the end of the night.

     While the costumes of early years were plastic shell facemasks, there are a few costumes that standout -either because they were a huge mistake or because they were, in my opinion, rather ingenious. I had decided one year to be a witch – neither ingenious nor inspiring really but I wanted to be a green witch, to be different. Well, that is exactly what i achieved. I covered my face, hands, and arms with green food colouring then added some large fake moles to complete the look. I was rather impressed with this until the end of the evening and I could NOT, for the life of me, remove the green tinge my skin had taken on. As a matter of fact as I went to Sunday School the next day I was still green and even still so on Monday morning when I went to school. It took nearly a week for the green to fade enough that it was no longer attracting the attention of everyone.

     The following year I decided to be polaroid camera. I crafted the camera our of box and set to drawing a dozen, or so, “polaroid” images on squares of paper so that I could pass them through the opening on the camera to those in attendance at the Halloween party. It took a great deal of time, but I was very proud of the work I had done. Halloween night I donned the costume at the party and had to spend the night standing. I hadn’t considered how the size of the box would limit my movement and since I only ad leotards on under the box for bottoms I couldn’t even cast the camera box aside - lesson learned. 

As the years went by, I slowly lost interest in the full costumes for Halloween, now it may be a half-hearted witch, but more often than not it’s Halloween colours instead of elaborate costumes. But whether or not I dress in a costume, I absolutely love welcoming the trick or treaters to my door in their costumes awaiting their treats.