The Bookless Club: What costumes have impressed you over the years?

Halloween has changed.

Nobody goes out as a hobo anymore.

You don’t see many witches or black cats.

Ghosts — the kind created with a sheet and a pair of scissors — don’t loom into view at your door.

Costumes used to be, for the most part, homemade. You foraged through your grandparent’s basement, your mom’s makeup drawer, your dad’s closet, and came up with something you could work with. Dracula usually made the scene as someone’s mother would have gone all in, with a trip to the fabric store plus a tube of blood-red lipstick sacrificed for art. One of dad’s white shirts would have had the collar starched into peaks for a quintessential Transylvanian effect. Leotards were a customary underpinning of the occasion. Two little girls would share one pair of divided leotards — the legs would be stuffed with plastic bags to create a black cat’s tail which would then be stitched onto the backside of yet another pair of leotards. The vast majority of us, however, ended up going out as hobos. The pièce de résistance was a stuffed bandana tied to a stick that you carried over your shoulder — pure Steinbeck.

So much for cottage craft. Halloween is now big business. There are 90 Spirit Halloween stores in Canada: 39 in Ontario, a single store in Prince Edward Island, and the 13 we have in B.C. If you include the stores in the U.S., the tally comes to over 1,575 seasonal stores. And the season starts early. The Spirit Halloween flagship store in New Jersey opens on Aug. 1 each year. They might qualify as shameless hawkers of merchandise, but the owners claim to have raised $29 million in donations to their Spirit Of Children charity. The funds go to children’s hospitals.

Along with the retail temperature of the big night, you see some pretty remarkable creativity on parade on Halloween. Some of the costumes that will darken your doorstep are off-the-rack interpretations of current TV shows and movies. Expect to see the old standbys of Austin Powers, Spider-Man, anything Toy Story, and all of the Disney princesses. But also expect the unexpected. Amongst my all-time favourites were two clever young girls in costumes that relied more than commercial tropes. One of the girls wore a long, plain, black gown. She had her hair pinned into a bun, simple glasses perched on her nose and — here’s the clue — a white lace collar. All rise for the Honourable Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her pal had layered two colourful T-shirts under a Mexican serape. She wore a large silver necklace and, on her head, a crown of colourful flowers. Add on bright red lipstick and — this was the giveaway — an unbroken line of eyebrow across her forehead. Ladies and gentlemen, the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo! Not bad for two kids clearly still in elementary school.

A version of the Fab Four showed up last year — four heads but only two feet. The young fellow had placed life-sized cutouts of three of The Beatles on his shoulders with his face as the fourth. He sported the emblematic dark suit and, of course, the “mop top” haircut, the signature look of the early Beatles.

A puzzling collective of kids showed up at the door dressed in vaguely western gear. It became completely obvious the minute they announced their theme. They were the cast of Yellowstone.

Personally, my own favourite costume was the slip I wore one year. It was homemade and featured Sigmund Freud’s face on the front of it. When asked what I was, I replied, “A Freudian slip”.

Jane Macdougall is a freelance writer and former National Post columnist who lives in Vancouver. She writes The Bookless Club every Saturday online and in The Vancouver Sun. For more of what Jane’s up to, check out her website, janemacdougall.com

Question: What costumes have impressed you over the years?

Send your answers by email text, not an attachment, in 100 words or less, along with your full name to Jane at thebooklessclub@gmail.com. We will print some next week in this space.