Halloween Costumes

Hi, friends I’m happy to be joining Erika and Shay for this month’s edition of Let’s Look. It feels like only yesterday we were looking at how we organise our closets! And now we are already in the second week of October talking about Halloween and ‘How We Select Halloween Costumes.’

I have to admit that when I saw the topic I was a bit stumped and I thought to myself. Well, this will be my shortest post ever. And the reason for this is that here in Australia Halloween is no way near as popular as it is in other parts of the world.

Reasons Why Halloween Isn’t Mainstream In Australia

I think that there are three main reasons why Australians haven’t totally embraced celebrating Halloween

1. Halloween has supernatural themes like ghosts, spooks and magic. So this puts many people off.
2. The idea of encouraging children to go to strangers’ homes asking for sweets is seen as unsafe.
3. It’s seen as a tradition that originates in America. So Aussies don’t feel inclined to celebrate it.

But every year it seems to be gaining more popularity and now more Australians are having parties and decorating their homes. Some parents are now also letting their kids dress up in Halloween costumes and go trick-or-treating. Here in Sydney where I live there are a few suburbs that really go all out when it comes to celebrating Halloween. But they are not common and so they can be hard to find.

So if you want to find a good area to go trick or treating in Sydney. The best thing to do is google “places near me to trick or treat”. This is the easiest way to find where to go because in general, most suburbs are very quiet on Halloween night. I only ever get a handful of kids knocking on my door. Our street isn’t really into celebrating Halloween.

How We Select Halloween Costumes

I guess the simple answer to how we select Halloween costumes is………we select them at the very last minute! I quickly threw together a Halloween party at my house last year. This was the first time that we had ever dressed up and we simply used things that we already had and came up with some simple costumes.

For example, my younger son used to practice Taekwondo so he dressed up as The Karate Kid. He just wore his uniform and I printed and stapled a Miyagi logo on his headband.

I dressed up as a dead doll. And my older son was supposed to be the kid from the Disney movie ‘Coco’. Except we used really cheap face paint which cracked and peeled off after 5 minutes. He looked more like a ghoul so he just went with it.

I had a kid’s crown from a previous party. So I made a sash out of an old happy birthday banner to go with it and my mum was Miss Universe.

The rest of my family also came up with some very simple and clever Halloween costumes too. There was a Jedi, Wally from ‘Where’s Wally’, one of the guys from ‘The Three Amigos’ a glamour queen and a harlequin clown. This was the first time that we had ever really celebrated Halloween as a family. We went all out that night with a big dinner, a fun Halloween cake and Halloween costumes. It was such a great night! You can read all about it here.

Halloween 2022 Costumes

Inspired by last year’s fun. This year we are planning an even bigger Halloween night. Because for the first time ever we are all going to dress up in Halloween costumes and go trick or treating as one big family. We will be with our two youngest cousins who are 10 and 12. So we figure that if we have some kids with us then it will be perfectly acceptable to get dressed up too!

Furthermore, we already have our costumes so we are all fully prepared this time. Earlier this year my cousin Terry had a super fun surprise birthday party. The theme was Star Wars so we all have the costumes that we wore on the night. And it’s a perfect opportunity to wear them again.

I used to feel conflicted about whether or not to celebrate Halloween but I’m not anymore. Now I see it as a great night to get together with my family. I am so excited to dress up and I know that we are all really looking forward to a fantastic night together.