I try to live by that idea. Even as my 40s are threatening to become my 50s, and my hair starts to shift from “silver fox” to “fox using a cane and complaining about the music being too loud,” I expend a lot of effort resisting the temptation to look backwards at how much better things used to be.
Because, for the most part, they weren’t. I’ll never understand why people on Facebook are so insistent that all the dumb things we used to do made us somehow better or stronger than kids today. Yes, it’s true that we didn’t use bike helmets or sunscreen, but now I have trouble remembering my grocery list and I’ve got several moles my dermatologist is keeping an eye on.
Despite what all the memes are telling you, the progress we’ve made has been mostly good. Mostly.
There’s one aspect of our childhood that is unquestionably better than the way kids do it today, and I’m tired of pretending that it’s not: Halloween was way better when kids had to make their own, homemade costumes.
In the 1980s, Halloween was a time when you and your parents put your heads together and tried to think of a fun costume that could easily be made at home. You didn’t consider getting a store-bought costume because one, they cost money, and two, costumes in those days looked like they came directly out of a nightmare sequence from a David Lynch movie.
I had one store-bought costume, once, and that was an Empire Strikes Back Luke Skywalker costume that I wore in the fall of 1981. It was basically a white, plastic Hefty bag with a poorly printed Luke Skywalker body on it, and the mask was a plastic mold of Mark Hamill affixed to my face with a rubber band tight enough to leave a line on my skin that only just went away a few months ago.
The mask didn’t even resemble Luke; it looked more like Anakin after he fell in the lava. And even in the crisp, fall weather, the heavy, chemically laced 1980s plastic draped around my body redlined my core temperature into Chernobyl territory. I didn’t look like Luke Skywalker so much as I looked like a mutant wrestler trying to cut weight.
From that point forward, my mother and I made all of my costumes together, to the best of our limited ability. When I wanted to be a karate guy, I wore my gi from karate class and painted a fake bruise on my face with some of my mom’s mascara. Being a military guy meant going to the army surplus store and buying camo pants and putting on some of my mom’s mascara to make it look like I camouflaged my face. When I was a football guy, we ironed “Jaws” on the back of a green shirt and used some of my mom’s mascara to paint to black rectangles under my eyes.
(As I’m thinking about it, I wore my mom’s mascara a lot. I might have to explore that in therapy, later.)
And it wasn’t just me—almost every kid had a homemade costume that repurposed sheets or cardboard boxes into something equal parts amateurish and awesome. Our Halloween parades looked like somebody wished for a yard sale to come to life. It was as glorious as it was goofy.
That’s not how it is today. My 10-year-old’s elementary school parade is filled with Spidermen and Deadpools and giant, green Incredible Hulks, all replete with fake muscles chiseled right into the fabric. I’m sorry, but grade-school kids shouldn’t look like they just wandered out of Pumping Iron.
The princesses all have resplendent rhinestone tiaras and the wizards all carry phoenix-feather wands, tinged with soot from the Hogwarts Express. Every costume is movie-accurate and detailed down to the exact shade of gunmetal gray on Wolverine’s claws, and yet … none of them look alive or interesting.
The heart buckle on Red’s belt might be exactly as it looked in Descendants, but it doesn’t have any heart.
I understand that we’re all very busy and the idea of making a toaster costume out of a 65-inch TV box is daunting when compared to just going to Target and buying an Elphaba set that looks like it tumbled out of the movie screen, but in a world that grows increasingly more digital and soulless every day, wouldn’t it be nice to return to a time when things were imperfect, but individual?
To return to the words of that great poet, William Martin Joel, we didn’t start the fire, but boy I’d love it if this year we threw all those store-bought costumes in the fire.
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Published and copyrighted in South Jersey Magazine, Volume 22, Issue 6 (September 2025)
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