A Homemade Halloween: Family Circus Train Costume!

Every year our church has a Fall Festival, which is basically just a fun get-together with costumes, games, food, and a Trunk-or-Treat at the end in the parking lot. Usually for Halloween we let the kids choose their own costumes, but we like to do a family costume for the annual Fall Festival.

My son loves trains, especially Thomas the Tank Engine, and he thought it would be really fun for us to be a train. I liked the idea, but I thought it would be more interesting to take it a step further and have us wearing costumes *in* the train cars! I'm not sure how I came up with the idea of a circus train, but as you can see above, that's what we ended up with!

My husband brought home some boxes from work and we had a great time making a big painting mess in the kitchen one night. My son was our engine, my husband was the clown (my son decorated his train car with him), my daughter Starlet was the Amazing Acrobat, Little Boo was the Monkey (she wanted to be a monkey for Halloween anyway), and I was, of course, the Ringleader. I always think it's fun to have us in costumes that are kind of fitting to our roles anyway. ;-)

For my costume I just used stuff we already had- my black boots, my running leggings, a white button-up blouse, a red velvet blazer, and a hat from an old Zorro costume we used once that I just made taller and fancier with black and red paper. Oh, and some white gloves we happened to have (I wanted my hubby to wear them but he wasn't interested. Oh, well).

For Starlet I picked up a gymnastics leotard and black tights from Target. It was a little bit of a splurge, but she may be taking gymnastics again soon, so I figure she might get some use out of it. My husband got his clown hair and nose/glasses from Wal-Mart, and I picked up Little Boo's costume from Old Navy- 50% off sale, so I got it for $12! And lastly, Monkey had his Thomas costume from many years ago when he was Thomas for Halloween.

Here are some photos of our family costume 2 years ago (just after Little Boo was born):

Our teams don't exactly match (Starlet is a Virginia Tech cheerleader!) but it had the overall effect we were looking for. And I loved that I was the referee. How fitting, right?

Can you see how I put Little Boo's hair up in tiny little pigtails? How cute is that!

This Halloween, be creative! If you have little ones who aren't TOO opinionated yet, then a family costume is a really fun way to go. Or, you could do like we did and do a family costume for a special function and then let the kids wear their own costumes for Halloween night.

I'm getting more creative later this week with Monkey's costume...stay tuned to see how it turns out!

Have you ever done a family costume before? Leave a comment and tell me about it! We need ideas for next year!! :-)