It's been six years now since we attended a Halloween parade at the elementary school. Six years since I abandoned altogether my position as chief costumer and treat-toting room mother. I'm not an adult celebrator of Halloween (although I know many such), and although I'm happy to pass out treats to anyone under 16 (it bugs me when kids who can afford their own iPods and gas for their cars come knocking at 9:30 p.m.), I don't really decorate and I don't dress up.

But I remember the days when I did. I remember when I could create any number of costumes based on a pair of foot pajamas:

Yellow pajamas + black electrician's tape = bumblebee

Red pajamas + red and black felt = ladybug

Blue pajames + red cape = Superman

Blue pajamas + backpack + 1-foot length PVC pipe = Ghostbuster

As the years went by, it got a little trickier. Perhaps the biggest challenge was the year my 5th grader wanted to be Spaceman Spiff--not just a comic-book character, but the imaginary ALTER EGO of a comic-book character, Calvin, from "Calvin and Hobbes." I told him nobody would know who he was supposed to be. He didn't care. That was who he had chosen to become, and because I had memories of my own mother standing over a pot in the kitchen dying a sheet brown so that I could be a tree in sixth grade, I felt a desire to make every effort. We got blue sweats. I created yellow tubes of material stuffed with quilt batting for "the fat part on the shoulders." We found an orange phaser-type weapon. And he was happy.

I had no compunctions about buying costumes for my kids, but you don't just walk into Wal-Mart and pick up a Spaceman Spiff suit. I remember what a hassle it was to try to figure that one out--and then I remember how excited he was to wear it and how proud he was to have a costume no one else would ever have even thought of.

And I remember how his brother spurned the generic black witch cape I tried to foist off on him in second grade when he wanted to be a vampire. "It doesn't have any POINTS," he lamented. I was really proud of myself for figuring out how to add a pointed collar, covering a cardboard shape with black fabric and stiching it to the neck of that black cape. And HE was happy.

There were other instances: matching witch costumes for the sisters; a genie costume with an elaborate beaded headdress; a prince costume for an earnest first-grade hero; an 18-month-old transformed into an angel via a winged pillowcase and a white turtleneck. ("What's this, wishful thinking?" the angel's great-grandfather asked.) None of them were masterpieces. None looked particularly professional or polished. But we loved them, and I discovered that they were actually another way of showing my kids how much I loved THEM, and that has always been the happiest thing about Halloween for me.