Growing up without having the allowance on hand to buy a Power Rangers Halloween costume (try as I might, 8 years running), I grew accustomed to cobbling my own costumes together out of whatever I had lying around or what I could find at thrift stores.
It turned out for the best in a lot of cases, and I collected as much candy as my chubby little 7th grade heart could bear.
When I moved onto the next stage of Halloween, poorly lit parties with The Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack on loop, the costume work ethic I had built up paid off even more.
Clark Kent and Danny Zuko did me well on $30 budgets, and I was more than prepared to do the same for the upcoming year.
Another major requirement, other than being more or less homemade, for me to consider something a good Halloween costume is it has to have some kind of cultural or pop culture significance. I love a slutty nurse just as much as the next Halloween enthusiast, but I prefer throwbacks to iconic movies or references to something real that people would immediately recognize.
A good Wesley from The Princess Bride would score well on the above system.
The inherent problem is going as half of a couple in an epic romance, hoping that the other half of my epic romance will want to match.
This is where my snobbishness, one of the few instances of it (or at least I hope so) rears its ugly head; am I really going to buy a costume impossible to find on in the back corner of a Value Village? That defeats the whole purpose of Halloween!
Time is my sole excuse for violating my own little morals this Halloween: I don’t have time to sew an entire dress, so it is time to put my money where my mouth (and my love for The Princess Bride) is.
