Halloween is one of those events where spending could easily get out of control. With the costumes, the candy, and the decorations it wouldn’t be difficult to quickly arrive at an amount that puts me out of my budget range for Halloween. Luckily for me I have a Halloween bucket of well used items. The bucket houses everything that has potential to be turned into a costume, and decorations that weren’t completely ruined from previous years. I was able to go through the box and get rid of a bag of stuff that we had outgrown, had been torn up, or that we were tired of.
After many decisions about Halloween costumes, we finally arrived at something simple, and something that could be created out of the Halloween box. My daughters ended up being vampires (not my first choice) and the look was fairly simple. Dress them in black, paint their faces, and voila. We did end up purchasing vampire teeth, which are now an added addition to the box, and black hair spray. The hair spray was one of the best purchases I made. The spray cost $4 which provided adequate coverage for both of them and allowed us to avoid purchasing a wig for both of them which could have ended up costing around $20.
We already owned all of the clothing items we needed for their costumes, and one of my daughters was able to wear my long black leather jacket which gave off a nice vampire effect. I reminded my daughters that two years ago when one of them was a pirate that they also wore my leather jacket for that costume as well, trying to illustrate to them to think outside the box when creating their costumes. My son was much easier. Since he is three I was easily able to allow my influence on his costume to become his own idea. We decided on a black cat. Again super easy costume, but one of the main reasons we chose this is because of some black cat ears that were purchased a few years back that have never been worn with a costume, but were purchased on clearance after Halloween.
Decorations were whatever was in the box. Unfortunately I waited until the day of Halloween to locate a pumpkin to carve, and there were none to be found. We did however end up with four different pumpkins that were in the box. One of them was battery operated and no longer worked, the other plugged into an outlet but no longer worked, and the final two were paper mache. I used Glade Wisp scented candle holders to provide spooky lighting and used one of the candles in the pumpkin so it gave us the affect of a carved pumpkin. It was a brilliant effect, and will definitely be used year after year. Pictures to come, but I am still amazed at how little we spent on Halloween this year, and hope that I haven’t missed out some good Halloween clearance to add for next years Halloween bucket.