A Literary Halloween

In our house, Halloween is all about the costume.  Ever since my son's first Halloween, when we bought him a little outfit from a local Indian store, made him a turban out of gauze stuck together with hot glue with a big fake jewel in the center, and put him in the baby backpack on the back of my husband, who was dressed in gray sweats and a spray-painted-grey Freddy Kruger mask (I think) with a gray tube hot-glued on to make the trunk of the elephant that was carrying our minature majaraja, we have always made a big deal out of our home-made costumes.

This year, my son picked a character from his favorite book from the summer reading program I described in a previous post.  First, I'll give you the passage that introduces his costume character:

He was the largest man Milo had ever seen, with a great stomach, large piercing eyes, a gray beard that reached to his waist, and a silver signet ring on the little finger of his left hand.  He also wore a small crown and a robe with the letters of the alphabet beautifully embroidered all over it.

That description comes from the classic 1961 book, The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster.  My son loves that book, because it has a lot of puns and turns of phrases, and reminds him a bit of another of his favorites, Alice in Wonderland (he went as The Mad Hatter several years ago before Johnny Depp made the Mad Hatter cool again).

The costume, as usual, took more time that I had expected, due in part to my son's exacting demands for accuracy (I, for example, just planned to write letters on his robe with a Sharpie, but that was rejected out of hand, since the text said the letters were EMBROIDERED).  But, in the end, I think it looked pretty good.

Here is the end result:

I hope everyone else's Halloween was as fun and as creative as ours was!