Costumes

This year will be the year when at least one of the kids leaves the house on Halloween wearing an awesome, innovative, homemade costume. Faithful readers of this blog may recall that last year I planned one of the coolest costumes made by anyone anywhere ever in the history of cool Halloween costumes, only to be foiled at the last minute by the dark forces of the Target costume section.

When I asked my seven-year-old son what he wanted to be this year, he told me "A samurai". This is no doubt because he developed a sushi fixation some time in the past year, which is something apparently most little kids in Marin go through at some time. His concept of the samurai wasn't just a simple robe-and-sash affari, a la Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo, but rather the version with armor and a helmet and all that. Much, much more complicated. Despite my suggestions to do something a little simpler (like my awesome Tintin costume idea), he remained steadfast in his determination to stick with his vision.

Long about the end of summer I always start thinking about the really cool Halloween costumes that I can make for my kids. And by "really cool" I mean something fun and unusual and sophisticated (somewhat) and creative and reasonably inexpensive. The only problem is trying to convince two small children that my costume ideas are really cool. That's the difficult part. Indeed, it's usually the part that derails all my carefully laid plans.

This year was no different than in years past. At the beginning of the school year my son and I started trying to develop a nifty Halloween costume. One of the things that he had in his current costume inventory was an ancient Egyptian headdress that I get from work. We decided King Tut could be a pretty cool costume—heck, we were halfway there already.