No Birds Were Harmed In The Making Of This Costume (But Some PVC May Have Suffered A Little)

Meredith may never wear an original costume. I have so many left over from both Jamie and Sabrina that she's covered for life. This year she will be either a frog or Tigger, depending which one fits best tonight.

Have you noticed how cheaply made the costumes are and the ever increasing prices for said poorly made costumes? At least when I was a kid the cheap costumes were actually CHEAP.

Do you recall the circa 1975 store bought costumes? A long thin sheet of plastic with the body of Princess Leia, or Mickey Mouse, or Darth Vader printed on one side and the character's rear view printed on the other. With a hole in the middle to stick your head through. To complete the look you had a plastic mask with a elastic band around the back of your head. And if your mask got ripped (which it always did) it had WICKED sharp edges with which to slice your face or poke out your eyeball. Good thing you weren't actually using your eyes to see where you were going.

These masks had holes cut out for your eyes, nostrils and mouth. Rarely did these holes actually line up with your eyes, nose, or mouth, thus ensuring hordes of children stumbling around the street in the dark.

And to top it off, if you lived in Pittsburgh, your Mom probably made you wear your coat over the costume anyway. So really just a bunch of kids in winter coats with brightly printed badly designed plastic covering their eyes tripping over the curbs and steps.

The costume of this type that stands out most in my mind is a Tweety Bird costume.
I'm not even sure it was my costume. It may have been one of my cousins' or possibly a neighbor's.

But for some reason I can still see this (sort of scary now that I'm looking at a photo of it) mask and smell the cheap plastic costume in my mind.

I wonder which costume my children will recall from the depths of their memory some day.