Last updated 11:00 a.m. MT on 22 February 2004.
Costuming on Purim Without Going Broke
In our community, people dress in costume for the Purim megillah reading. Traditionally, I think most if not all costumes were based on biblical themes -- Esther, Modechai, the hated Haman, the doomed Vashti. These days, there is a much wider variety of costume, ranging from recycled Halloween costumes all the way up.
Our family has been doing family theme costumes for the last few years. Some of our past efforts:
- Cats. We made headbands with pointy ears, painted whiskers
on our faces, and wore tabard-like things I cut out of some fake
fur I found among the fabric piles in our basement. The older kids wanted to be Teenage Mutant Ninja Kitties, hence the weapons in this picture.
- Hippies. We have an extensive collection of tie-dyed t-shirts that was put to good use. We found or borrowed hole-y jeans, wore sandals (or went barefoot), made fake-flower headbands, and wore old Mardi Gras beads with aluminum-foil peace symbols attached. Aren wore a long-haired wig to go with his beard.
- Ghosts. We had already begged or borrowed all the old white sheets in town for a ghost-theme birthday party and nobody wanted them back.
- Tourists. We did this the year after we'd spent the entire summer on the road. We wore t-shirts we'd picked up along the way, sun hats, sunglasses, cameras -- you get the picture.
- A fairy tale theme complete with castle, dragon, knights in
shiny armor, a sorceress, and a damsel in distress. This theme
arose from the fact that we already had the dragon and the castle.
We'd made them for yet another birthday parties.
(That dragon was used for lots of things before it finally
succumbed.) We bought Aren a green sweatsuit to match the dragon
and modified the castle so that I could put it on (unfortunately, I
couldn't sit down in it).
Miriam had a robe we'd made from one of those old white sheets that was still hanging around. I think we added some trim I'd picked up at a notions sale. We made her a yarn wig and found a great branch for her to use as her staff of power. The two older boys were the knights -- boots over black long johns and black sweatshirts, those plastic chest shields, swords, and helmets you find at toy stores. And our little Nathan was the damsel in distress. We hadn't cut his hair yet and he had really beautiful blonde ringlets. We borrowed a dress for him and he was all set.
- Bruins hockey players. Basic Bruins t-shirts, black sweat pants, helmets (we actually had two hockey helmets, one with a face guard - everyone else used their bike helmet), street hockey sticks. The only mistake we made was bringing along one of the plastic pucks - there was a hockey game going on in the back of the room for much of the evening.
- A rainbow. Everyone wore sweats in a different color - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. The only one we had to look for and purchase was the orange one, though I did end up dying some white sweats of Miriam's yellow. The orange sweatshirt is still in use four years later, so I don't feel bad about buying it. We also wore visors in colors that matched our outfits. We used fabric paint and made a rainbow and wrote "Horowitz Rainbow" on each. The visors are still floating around, too.
- Arthur Dent from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This was ridiculously easy. Everyone wore a bathrobe and carried a towel. Some people even got the joke.
- Wizards. I made simple floor-length robes for everyone. Most of us had hoods on our robes; one child wanted a tall pointed hat instead.
- Aliens in Black. I bought some headbands with googly eyes that lit up and everyone wore black clothes and dark sunglasses. We even made up AIB business cards -- "Protecting the Universe from the Scum of the Earth". Our youngest son is holding his stuffed gorilla, Koko, who was also dressed for the occasion.
This year one of the boys wants to do a joint costume with a friend. We may tie into their idea somehow or do something completely different. Stay tuned.
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