Archive for September, 2009
Buying Halloween Costumes Online
Halloween is easily one of my favorite holidays. Maybe it’s the kid in me that still likes to binge on candy. Maybe I like spooky ghosts. But I know that I love when people dress up in costumes. Dressing up in costumes is a great way for people to be creative, or silly, or witty, or scary. I love all of those things. I look forward to Halloween every year and love browsing through costume shops as soon as I can. Well, at least I used to. Now I tend to shop for most of my Halloween costumes online.
The are some benefits (and a few downsides) to buying my Halloween costumes online. First of all, you don’t have to try to find a Halloween costume shop. Many of them are seasonal, and spring up and hard locations to find. Even once you get inside, Halloween stores don’t get any easier. They’re usually under-staffed and a big mess, to put it nicely. There’s usually no system of organization to speak of – good luck finding something in particular. Especially as it gets closer to Halloween, the place resembles a junk heap – and the people swarm in like vultures. No thanks.
You don’t have any of those problems if you opt to buy your Halloween costumes online. The online costume stores have thousands of different costumes to choose from. You’ll never be at a loss for ideas or inspiration; and you won’t get lost like you might in a store. Unlike the physical stores, a simple Internet search will direct you right to a online costume store. No mess, no crowds, buying Halloween costumes online is the way to go. The best thing about Halloween costumes online is that you never feel like you’re “stuck” with something; if you can’t find what you’re looking for, you can simply try another web site. Many Halloween stores are difficult to find in the first place; you want to go across town to another one in the mere hope that they have something else?
Of course, this isn’t a perfect solution. Of course, you get plenty of pictures of the Halloween costumes online, but pictures can always be a but deceiving. Furthermore, sizes aren’t exactly standardized with Halloween costumes, so you’re playing a bit of a guessing game as well.
Overall, I prefer to purchase my Halloween costumes online. They majority of them offer costumes in the thousands, all throughout the year. You can sometimes find deals in the “off-season”; and if you plan ahead a bit, you’ll get exactly the costume you were looking for.
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Halloween costume ideas
Halloween costume ideas aren’t hard to come by if you’re willing to be a little bit creative. It’s understandable if you don’t want to go as one of the typical Halloween costumes of lore – whether it be the ghost or mummy, or witch or vampire, or even something more recent like “sexy nurse” or “fireman.” Those are all kind of played out, though it should be said that the classics never really go out of style permanently. A good ghost or ghoul will still win you plaudits if done correctly.
That said, it’s the outside-the-box Halloween costume ideas that usually win the most praise. Halloween these days is less about spooky stories and more about coming up with a costume that best expresses your individuality. For some that means a modern take on classic Halloween costume ideas, but for others that means going in a new direction entirely.
As an example of what I mean by “new direction entirely,” consider that a few years ago I was at a Halloween party where one of the partygoers dressed up as “Postmodernism.” That’s not a person or a place, or something you can even have a mental image of. It’s an abstract intellectual theory that may or may not have any bering on the proceedings you’ll indulge in that evening.
I was blown away at the creativity of the idea. This was someone who’d really taken the time and the effort to come up with Halloween costume ideas that were unique and wholly original. “Postmodernism” was something he could play around with, creating his own illusion of what the idea meant and therefore what his costume should be. It was a coup on his part to come up with “postmodernism” as his costume, since the postmodernist movement was designed to deconstruct and therefore undermine traditional thought and convention in the arts. Kind of made it a 100% cinch to be a great Halloween costume with the barest of effort once the first wall – the wall of creative thought and breaking through the barriers of convention – was knocked down.
The inherent irony then is that he used postmodernist theory to create a corporeal (and thererore modern) “Postmodernism” Halloween costume. It worked on so many levels!
If that’s not your bag, you can still apply the same type of critical thinking to this year’s costume. Maybe rather than going as a critical movement you can go as an artistic movement – you are “pointilism,” or Picasso’s “Blue Period.” Or something else entirely – there’s a world of Halloween costume ideas out there for you to discover.
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