Costume Mishaps - Parenting Plights & Delights

Happy Halloween!

Halloween is a big favorite for kids. They get all hyper and drive their parents bananas. All the excitement of finding a costume and gathering a stash of free candy - woo hoo! 

I guess I never outgrew the crazy get-ups. 

Sometimes it's not all it's cracked up to be, like when something goes wrong with a costume. 

I have bad memories of Halloween when I was in kindergarten and dressed up as a witch. I wore one of those cheap masks with an elastic string to hold it on. Our class paraded single file down the school corridors and through other classrooms. Johnny, the kid behind me, kept pulling and twanging that elastic string so it hit the back of my head. Nonstop.

I cried and cried, but he wouldn't let up. If only I'd had a broom stick...

One Halloween when my son was seven or eight, he wore a California Raisin costume. They were a hit back in 1986 or '87. Here's a video of a big kid wearing one:

The costumes were popular because of this funny commercial: 

My son thought he had the best costume in the neighborhood, until he walked into a tree and was knocked flat on his back. It was hard to see out of those little eye holes, especially at night. 

A few years later the school banned masks for Halloween parties and parades because masks make it hard for kids to see where they're going!

I think my favorite costume mishap story is from my writer friend, Hobo Annie. She left this comment on my post on October 10th:

"Once a friend and I had to be witches in a play, so we put green food coloring in base makeup. Worked great for the show...but we had to go to school with green-stained faces for a week!"

This is Annie Howland nowadays.
 The green food coloring incident
happened back in high school.

Psst: Just in time for Halloween, she released a new Kindle book, 

Stirring Up Spiders,

a collection of dark tales for grown ups. 

You can find it here.   

Jerry Seinfeld reminisces about one of his childhood costumes: "Then, finally, the third year, begging the parents, I got the Superman Halloween costume... Remember the rubber band on the back of that mask? That was a quality item there, wasn't it? That was good for about 10 seconds before it snapped out of that cheap little staple they put it in there with."

Hmm, I wonder why that stupid rubber band on my witch mask held up so well. Figures. 

Do you have any costume-gone-wrong stories? Bad memories or disappointments from trick-or-treating, like poor Charlie Brown who always got a rock tossed into his bag instead of candy?

Do you have a parenting or grandparenting memory

or another story you'd like to share? 

If you're not a parent, memories from your own childhood count, too. 

Warning: I might feature your story in a future post. 

(Names can be changed to protect the guilty!)

I'd like to thank all those who have shared their stories. 

These posts wouldn't be the same without your input.

If you don't want to leave a comment but would rather contact me by email, 

you can reach me at: lynkelwoohoo at yahoo dot com.