Homemade Halloween Costumes - Your Kids Will Love Them

When I was a kid, the best thing in the world to have for Halloween (besides tons and tons of candy) was a store-bought Halloween costume. The cool kids had store-bought costumes. The losers like me had a sheet draped over her head - usually a crappy, stained sheet that only needed to have one hole cut out for the eyes because the other hole was already there - and called herself a ghost. I hated my homemade costumes - if you can even call a crappy old sheet a costume - and would have given my little sister's right arm to have a store-bought costume.

Times change, and somehow today's generation of kids loves homemade costumes. When my first daughter got old enough to know what was going on, I proudly took her to Kmart to purchase her very first Halloween costume. There was no way on earth that my daughter was going to suffer through the Halloween-humiliation that I had had to suffer through as a child. No siree. Only the best that Kmart had to offer for my child!

For a brief minute she looked through the various costumes that I held out for her inspection, shaking her head at each one. Finally she asked, "Mommy? Why won't you make me a costume? Is it too hard? All I need is a sheet."

Yup. All she wanted was a sheet so that she could be a 'scary ghost'. The store-bought ghost costumes were ... well, even I had to admit that they were kind of crummy. But why settle for being a ghost? She could have been a princess, or Belle from 'Beauty and the Beast', or Minnie Mouse ... Nope. She wanted to be a ghost. So I became determined to make her into the very best ghost that she could be - and that started with buying a brand new white sheet. Then I tried to trick her into going for something a little more elaborate than a plain old sheet-ghost. I thought that perhaps we could purchase a little plastic tiara and transform her into a princess-ghost! Or maybe a cowboy hat and holster to make her into a cowboy ghost! No. Just a plain old ghost.