Halloween 2012--photos, of course

This year we had a theme going with the costumes.  (Well, except for Smiley, who had already decided he wanted to be a fireman, and had a "new" hand-me-down of that fireman raincoat. Great!) My girls and my dear Becky's girls were inspired by the recent LitWits Workshop of The Hobbit, and decided to be Tolkien elves.  Happy and Merry and Miss K on the right were Elven princesses, Sunny was an Elven Hunt-maiden (we made up that phrase to suit her look), and Miss C on the left was Galadriel. 

For our costumes we were once again thankful to have the princess dresses my mother made for the girls years ago (although they are now having to pass them down to the smaller sisters!), and pulled the rest from their drawers and the dress-up box.  It was fun to realize Sunny is just tall enough to start wearing some of my old costume things, like my leather Ren-faire bodice from our early days of marriage.   And Merry wore a warm cloak my mother made for me when I was a Madrigal singer in the high school choir.  Happy's cloak was whipped up by a friend just for this occassion (I called her to see if she had a dress-up cloak we could borrow, since her daughter used to love dress-up, and she said she had this big piece of fabric we could borrow and then decided to just make it into a cloak for us!).  And Merry and Sunny's headpieces and Happy's breastpiece are necklaces I inherited from my Grandma (mother's mother) while she was still living. These are the best kinds of costumes for me--made up from imagination and borrowings and creative making-do.

The one thing I did have to purchase turned out to be more expensive than I would have liked--but I have a feeling will get used over and over and over: elf ears.  Sure, you can find clumsy plastic elf ears at novelty and costume stores, but if I am going to spend the money on something, I don't want to get junk.  So we bought lightweight molded latex ears from a company online, and attached them to the girls' ears with spirit gum--just like you would do for stage or film.  The girls were so cute in them!  And the ears were so subtle you almost don't notice them at first glance (I bought the smallest ears, although there are lots of different kinds of elves, and thus elf ears, I learned).  In the group  photos you can just barely see them poking out from the girls' hair.  (Unfortunately, Sunny's ear that is showing the most in the group photos is the one ear that was held improperly while the spirit gum was drying, so that the bottom sticks out wrong. At least I got her "good" ear for her individual shot. ; )  But the ears were lightweight, comfortable, stayed on, and will fit them even better as they grow--a worthwhile costume purchase for a family who loves Tolkien, I have a feeling!

 

 

By the time our friends were gone and I was taking these individual portrait Smiley was done wearing his coat.  So I just took a photo of him in what he was wearing underneath, holiday appropriate hand-me-downs.  I just love my little guy.  

   

(None of us realized Smiley was being hidden by his hood in almost all of these group pics--all my pics capture the kids with such great expressions, except there is always one kid with a funny look or blinking or partially obscured or something. Such is life.)

The rest of the pics I could show you would be the same as those I have posted Halloweens past--we have the same traditional Trick-or-treat route in the nice neighborhood above us, a loop of just the right size for a hefty haul, but not too long to be tiring.  And being a loop, there is a clear beginning and ending point, so no fuss about stopping too soon!  Neither Becky nor I are fans of the holiday--I tell my girls we don't celebrate Halloween, we observe it--so our little tradition of dinner and the trick-or-treat loop is just the right amount of family fun and making memories without undue attention to the rest of the holiday. : )  It is special because we do it together.


(Oh, and for those of you still wanting to be able to picture our teeny house, here is one more glimpse--this is the front door, our traditional backdrop for photos.  That's my dresser on the left, which marks the edge of the "living room/master bedroom suite."  The microwave cabinet on the right marks the edge of the kitchen.  With five little-girl-widths between the two.)