I considered calling this post “How to maximize your ROI at Halloween”, but I figured that would attract exactly the wrong kind of readership.

Our family has a weird relationship with Halloween. Sandi and I are not huge fans. The girls like the candy, but don’t especially like to trick-or-treat. On the other hand, all of us like to make things and Halloween provides a good excuse for us to work together on a family project.

For the last two years, CeCe has been our Halloween champion with her Barbie-in-a-box costume, which attracts more than a few hits around Halloween from people looking for costume ideas. In our neighborhood, and in our annual trip to the local trick-or-treat event at Marsh Grocery, the costume attracted a lot of attention.

Carissa made a valiant attempt to draw some attention away from CeCe last year with a jellyfish costume, but CeCe was still the star.

This year, Carissa and CeCe both picked new designs that became major undertakings for us to implement on the two days before Halloween. Sadie chose to go as a witch, a much simpler costume than the ones her sisters wanted, and this choice probably saved our family’s sanity. She’s our shy one, and doesn’t like to draw a lot of attention to herself in public, so it suited her just fine to let her sisters be the standouts.  We did make a last minute effort to turn the costume into a Rapunzel costume, but we couldn’t make it work on short notice.

She makes a cute witch, and thank heavens for at least one simple costume!

CeCe chose to go as an Ice Cream Truck.  This was an interesting idea she picked up from a website, and she and Sandi decided to make it as over-the-top as they could.  Sandi got some lights form a dollar store, a few free boxes, we broke out our Cricut machine and went to work cutting letters and pasting ice cream cone pictures.  A trip to Goodwill helped Cece complete her outfit, and I put together a soundtrack of ice cream truck music that she played with a spare iPod and a small speaker as she walked around.  It turned out really cute.

CeCe’s costume played this song. Among others.  It was annoying and fascinating at the same time.   :-D

Carissa’s choice was to go as an iPhone.  This worked out pretty well.  Sandi wrapped a box with black paper and foil, then added various buttons.  We blew up screen captures of various icons to put on the screen and I painstakingly recreated all of the little text and symbols on the back.  While our iPhone costume was not the fanciest one that anyone wore this year for Halloween, it still turned out pretty well.

The app in the top center is “FaceTime.”

The best part of the effort was getting to show off the costumes, though.  As usual, Sandi took great pride in building these costumes cheaply.  We spent less than $20 on both costumes — but we more than made it back!

On the night before Halloween, we went to the Claremont Lions Club Halloween party that they have for local school kids.  Carissa went to a sleep over at a friends house, so Sadie wore her costume.  CeCe won the costume contest, both for her age group and for the best overall costume!  The first win came with a prize of $15 and the other with a prize of $20.  Not bad, right?

After the party, we decided to go out to dinner.  After a lot of effort to agree on a restaurant, we ended up, by chance at a nearby TGI Friday’s.  It turns out they were having costume contest too.  Between our two costumes (which the CeCe and Sadie ran back out to the car to put on), we won a $100 gift card to Best Buy.

Not a bad haul — $135 — and we hadn’t even gone trick-or-treating yet.

When we went out in the neighborhood on Halloween, everyone we walked by commented on Carissa’s and CeCe’s costumes.  Later in the evening, after Carissa and Sadie had given up and gone home, CeCe kept getting compliments at various houses about how her costume was the “best they had seen all evening” and several people even stopped her long enough to take a picture of the costume.

I don’t know how we are going to top this next year.

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