Halloween night: the costume and the yard

Halloween is the only night of the year when a stranger's child walks across your garden in the dark, wearing something that limits what they can see. Everything below follows from that one sentence.

We make a costume and we make the pieces that go in the yard. Both have a part in this, and the yard half is the part sellers usually skip.

Parents ask about flammability first. It matters, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission answers it plainly:

Our reaper set is polyester, which is one of the two fabrics named there. We are not going to print the words flame resistant next to it, because that is a label with a test behind it and we have no test to show you.

The larger risk on the night is a car, not a candle. The same guidance is specific about what helps:

A reaper costume is black by design. That is the whole point of it and it is also the worst possible colour at six in the evening on a residential street.

So the tape goes on. A strip round each cuff, one across the back of the hood, one on the bag. Reflective tape is sold in hardware and bike shops, it costs very little, and it does not spoil the costume in daylight photographs.

A torch does the rest, and the guidance says so in one line:

Give it to the child rather than carrying it yourself. A torch held by the adult lights the adult.

Long robes look right and behave badly. Kerbs, porch steps and the last stair in a hallway are where they catch.

Our sizes run by age, five to six through eleven to twelve, and the honest advice is to buy the age rather than a size up for next year. A robe bought long enough to grow into is a robe that drags this year, on the night it is worn.

If it is already long, take the hem up with iron on tape rather than pinning it. Pins come out on the second porch.

The hood is the other one. It narrows the field of view exactly where a child needs it, at the sides, when crossing between parked cars. The CPSC applies the same test to masks:

Push the hood back at kerbs. It is worth saying out loud on the doorstep before the group leaves, because nobody thinks about it once the sweets start.

Every lit piece we put in a yard is an object in a dark garden with a rope going into the ground. On this one night that is not a decoration, it is a hazard, and the guidance says so without any hedging:

We are not going to tell you to take the display down on the night it exists for. What we do on our own street is simpler.

The witch is the piece that suits this best, and that is not a sales line: she hangs on glass or wall, so nothing about her is on the ground at all.

A carved pumpkin with a real flame sits at exactly the height of a child's sleeve on a doorstep. The CPSC guidance is about placement rather than about banning them:

Battery tea lights removed this problem from our street about six years ago and nobody has mentioned missing the real thing since.

Our reaper set arrives as seven separate things: robe, hood, belt, gloves, scythe, crow and notebook. That is more parts than most costumes and it is the reason the set works and the reason it needs ten minutes of attention.

The gloves and the crow are the two that go missing, every time, in the half hour before leaving. Lay all seven out on a bed at five o clock and the evening runs differently.

The scythe splits into three sections. Assemble it outside rather than in a hallway, because a full length prop swung indoors finds a lampshade within about a minute.

It is a prop and not a toy for a crowd. In a queue of children on a doorstep it wants to be held vertically, and a child under about seven will need reminding of that more than once.

Strip it back and the list is short. A costume that fits at the ankle, tape on the cuffs, a torch, a lit path, and nothing in the way between the pavement and the door.

The display is the part everyone remembers and the part that matters least at ground level. Get the path right first, then make the front of the house look like something.