By Celeste

I honestly never would have guessed that Halloween costumes would have become our family’s “thing.”  It just sort of happened.

We had one good costume (the chicken costume year) and then the bar was set and people sort of expected it of us every year.  Then, when our Christmas Story costume went viral on Pinterest.  Well . . . the bar has become pretty high.

But its fun.  And actually, it has become something that strengthens our marriage.  Rich and I actually look forward to the late nights in October constructing our family’s costumes.  Because we do it together and because it’s fun for us.

People often ask me for advice or ask me how to come up with family Halloween costume ideas.  So I thought I’d answer some FAQs of Halloween costumes below.

Usually our ideas are based on personal preferences and one good idea.

Decide on your own personal preferences

In order to come up with an idea- it’s helpful to first decide on what you like.  That will give you a good base to work off of and then you can make your Google and Pinterest searches more specific.

Personally I prefer costumes that are either people or animals instead of things, ideas or inanimate objects.  I don’t like huge, bulky outfits (things that involve paper mache or cardboard) and I don’t like costumes that look so intricate that someone quit their day job to create it.

Rich happens to disagree with all three of my costume preferences 😉  And that’s fine- you can too.

So what do you like??  The Halloween classics (witches, vampires, zombies)?  Puns?  Movie costumes?  Quick and easy?

All of our costumes have started with just one good costume idea and we’ve elaborated from there.  For instance, when we were the Huxtables, we had some great matching sweaters and thought, “What’s the best costume that would involve ugly sweaters?”  Cliff Huxtable came to mind.

How do you make costumes cheaply and easily?

Don’t think you need to know how to sew

I do tend to sew some every Halloween, but know that I only have the most basic of sewing skills and the only costume where sewing was really necessary was the pink nightmare bunny suit and even that could have been done with just a pink sweat suit and bunny ears.  Most all other costume sewing can really be done by cutting and hot gluing and safety pins 🙂

RIT dye and thrift stores are your friend

We don’t have a ton of money to waste on costumes.  So we get all our needed items almost exclusively from Salvation Army or GoodWill.  Its much harder to get the item you need in the color you need, so we try to get the clothes white so then we can dye them whatever color we want with RIT dye.

Can I rent your previous costumes?

I never would have considered this, but this year, I’ve received two requests to rent our three amigos costumes, so we thought sure! Why not?  If you’re willing to pay shipping and handling to you and back to us- we’re willing to send!  All costumes are available except the three amigos one.  Also, I don’t think I’d ship my lamp because it’s just huge, but I’d ship all the other costume items associated with the costume.  Shoot me an email if you’re interested in any of them.

Why don’t you just tell me what to be?

Well ok.  How about this, why don’t I include some of my favorite costumes I’ve come across that I don’t think I’d ever replicate (which takes away a lot of my best ideas- sorry about that). All images are linked to their pin on Pinterest, so click on through:

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First watch this:

One last tip:  Own it. 

Family Halloween costumes are actually fairly awkward by nature (posting a montage of your family’s costumes is even worse!!), so you just have to own it.