Reasons Why You’re Broke – Halloween

In accordance with 2010’s calendar, Halloween this year is effectively split in two parts: Today, Halloween proper, is the day for the kids. They’ll dress up and promenade and collectively beg until mom and dad decide they’ve had enough candy. Then its over.

Saturday night, which you are more than likely recovering from currently, was your Halloween, a night that, from what you can remember, began innocently enough. Your Antoine Dodson or Snooki or Chilean miner costume was gleaming and breathtakingly accurate, and you were sure, from the first moment you saw it, that a member of the opposite sex would love it just as much. Which is why you paid forty dollars for it. Financial mistake number one.

Like with any large and shamelessly commercial holiday, your level of Halloween success is perceived to stem directly from what you put into it. The more you spend on a costume, the more effort you exert applying layers of make up or painstakingly working on your awful New Jersey accent, the more real the experience becomes, and the more fun you will have. Unfortunately, unless you are inordinately clever, creating a convincing costume is hard to do for free. Which means you need to spend some some money – and a lot of it, depending on how ambitious you get.

Anecdotal evidence, however, shows that it is indeed possible to do a lot with little. This is where those costumes built on puns and one-liners come in. Costumes such as “A formal apology” (two-piece suit with name tag reading “Sorry”) or “Cereal killer” (anything involving mutilated cereal boxes) work because they add a certain amount of guess work into the costume-identifying process. They take the financial investment and convert it into a mental one.

Now it might actually be too late for advice, but if you are trying to save money, keep things simple. Go for the tried-and-true favorites of Halloweens gone by – the witches, the vampires, the sexy Abraham Lincolns. As an alternative, create costumes based on ideas, not things. Only then can you create something both cheap and chuckle-inducing.

But then again, it’s a bit too late to take back that Avatar outfit, isn’t it?

Image courtesy of Flickr user jelene.