HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
Hopefully, some of you saw the article in the Sun-Sentinel last week, featuring “Green Halloween”. I have had so much fun volunteering at Trash2Treasure’s Creative Re-Use Center throughout the month of October, encouraging kids (and parents) to “think outside the box”, use their imaginations, and create Halloween costumes from reusable, recycled and re-purposed supplies.
Why is it that making your own Halloween costume is such a novel idea these days?
Friday night I volunteered at an outdoor, family-friendly, safe Halloween festival, and I saw hundreds of costumes on children, and fewer than a dozen of them were created by hand. Didn’t everybody make their own costumes when we were kids? Am I that “old” or “old fashioned”? What happened to change our value of creative expression and replace the individual results with pre-made, fixed identity, multiple replica version, plastic costumes?
Maybe it’s not about a changing value, maybe this generation never learned it was possible to make their own…
“Back in the day”, before over-consumption got the best of us, and we forgot how to create, when Halloween came around, all we needed was a vision, some simple materials, maybe a sewing machine, and a costume was born. Sheets became ghosts, cardboard became shields, anything black became a witch. And any old clothing became the makings for a number of costumes– a hobo, an old lady, a tattered clown, a scarecrow. In a household with kids, there were always crayons, paints, markers, colored paper, and glue.
And didn’t every house have a “dress-up” box or trunk, that collection of grandmas hats, scarves, old jewelry, boots, stockings and “stuff”?
When my daughter was little you could “buy” a complete dress-up trunk. When did we drift away from appreciating the connections and creative expression that comes from to collecting your own? Or did we just get too busy?
I believe that lots of kids don’t know it’s possible to make your own costume– they can’t “see” the vision of it unless it’s exactly like the one they saw in a box at the store, or the one their friend has– and they have very limited experience creating something out of something else. And even the parents aren’t comfortable with the process! Toys like blocks, that don’t come with pre-set models or assembly instructions, have been replaced by video games. Even so-called “creative” toys come in packaged “kits” where no creativity is required. So, kids are told to just follow the instructions exactly. Watching kids with parents at the festival, I saw over and over parents telling their children exactly how to draw a face on the ghosts we were creating, rather than allowing the kids to just draw the face as they wanted to…
Do ghosts smile or growl? Are they scary or friendly? You decide for yourself, an let your children decide. What a cardboard box can become is anything you can imagine! There is no right or wrong, and no pre-set instructions.
What does your vision of a Witch look like? Is her hair green or black or orange…or even pink?
Make it your own and allow your children to express their imagination whenever you can.
Thank goodness for the “greening” of America…it’s not a new concept– making your own Halloween costume from re-purposed items– it’s a recycled one. I’ve learned that everything comes around again if you wait long enough– there are very few totally new ideas, we just package them differently for our new sensitivities after we’ve forgotten them for a while. Those of us with Depression-era Grandmother’s learned most of the secrets to reducing, reusing and recycling from them Roblox robux hack as they passed the traditions down through the generations. And for those who weren’t fortunate enough to have that life experience, we now have a new “trend” for us all to embrace.
Consumerism certainly has taken its toll over the past decade or two, but I am encouraged to see that with the recent focus on supporting anything “green”, we expect next Halloween there will be more than a handful of “homegrown” costumes walking the streets.
And for all you adults out there– you’ll be amazed what you discover when you give yourself a little time to enjoy creating!
Go out and play today!