Boooooooooots!!!!

 Every year at the beginning of September my mother used to ask me and my two brothers one very important question: “What do you want to be for Halloween this year?”

Now, that’s a hard question for most kids, especially ones in elementary school when new “favorite” cartoon and fairytale characters change with the seasons. But in our house it was a question that needed to be asked early. It was around this time every year that my mother would get out her sewing machine, head to the fabric store and start concocting three elaborate homemade Halloween costumes for us. We knew that once we picked our costume, we would be wearing that costume, and that was that.

Usually, it worked out just fine. Aside from the one year when my older brother decided the week before Halloween that being Peter Pan to my Tinkerbell wasn’t “cool” with the 2^nd grade set, we were happy with our choices.  In fact, our costumes were good, and usually got a lot of compliments, especially from adults.

me, Tinkerbell

 Through the years,  I have been transformed into the Queen of Hearts, a Fair Maiden, Tinkerbell (twice), Hannah Montana (also twice) and Cinderella. I have been one of three blind mice, one of the three musketeers—and yes, each time my mom made all three costumes. I have seen my brothers become dinosaurs, lions, tigers, a loli-pop kid, a sumo wrestler and Captain Hook. That explains Tinkerbell’s repeat performance, by the way. My little brother “needed” to be Captain Hook, and begged me to be Tinkerbell again. I figured I owed him the favor. He did, after all, happily walk around as my sheep when I was Little Bo Peep.

Little Bo Peep and my sheep 

So what does this have to do with boots? Well, my mom left nothing to chance…not even our footwear. Yes, she made “boots” for almost every costume to cover our regular sneakers, which were the safest shoes to wear on a dark night, she said. And I have to hand it to her, the “boots” really did finish off the costumes.

Of course, when I got a little older, not too old for trick-or-treating, but “too old” for my mom’s hand-made costumes, I wore my own boots. My boot collection was just kicking into high gear when I was a biker girl. I loved the leather jacket, the pleather pants, the tall leather boots. I felt cool. I did after all get to sit on a motorcycle.

Now, as my twenty something life goes on, I look back on Halloween and have a new appreciation for how my mom put together so many elaborate costumes in such a short amount of time. She whipped them up proudly, and I even think she was disappointed when we outgrew the need for her needlework and wanted to throw together our own crazy costumes at the last minute. I remember the detail, the fittings, the first time I tried on my finished costumes. And I remember the boots…a detail that never went unnoticed to me.