Discount Kids Halloween Costumes

Have your children been absorbed in Harry Potter over the last few years? Well, now is the chance For them to get dressed up in the various Harry Potter characters and act out the stories. Great for kids Halloween costumes!

Gryffindor is one of the four Houses of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, founded by Godric Gryffindor.  Its emblematic animal is the lion and its colours are scarlet and gold. So these costumes are perfect for anyone from the house of Gryffindor.

You could be Hermione, Ron, or even Harry Potter with this new Gryffindor Robe. The costume consists of a black ankle length robe with an attached hood and burgundy accents, with an embroidered Gryffindor Crest patch on the front.

Quidditch is a fictional sport developed by the author J. K. Rowling for the Harry Potter book series. The game is described as very rough but a very popular semi-contact sport played by wizards and witches around the world.

This Quidditch Robe Costume is an ankle length robe which is crimson with an attached hood and yellow side stripes and a Gryffindor crest.

As Harry Potter starts his sixth year at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, he discovers an old book mysteriously marked  “This book belongs to the Half-Blood Prince” and he begins to learn more about Lord Voldemort’s dark past.

This costume consists of a hooded robe with a shirt-front attached and a character mask. You do not need to belong to the House of Slytherin or be on the Malfoy family tree, but it just might help.

Hedwig was Harry Potter’s pet Snowy Owl and magical familiar. Harry chose the name “Hedwig” after finding the name in A History of Magic. During her life, Hedwig provided Harry with message and package carriage and loyal companionship.

This costume includes a white plush jumpsuit with an attached owl character headpiece.

The Struggle for a Safe and Sane Halloween 1920 – 1990

When the police did get tough with revelers, there were sometimes protests from the public. In 1936, the jailing of seven small boys who splattered tomatoes over a newly painted veranda in Richmond Hill, just outside of Toronto, led to howls of protests from local residents, who believed that the pollee had overreacted to what was nothing more than a customary prank. Two years earlier, the citizens of Kerrisdale, Vancouver, were up in arms over what they termed the “buekomate” tactics of the police, who used a mounted force to disperse a Halloween crowd.

The police argued that their actions were a legitimate response to the damage caused the previous year, when “a crazy gang of youths”  looted stores and dragged automobiles around the block. In fact, residents, including the principal of the local school, had demanded greater vigilance. But this did not stop Clarence Campbell, a thirty-year-old garage man, from suing the police for using excessive force in the dispersal of a customary revel. He had been trampled down in the affray and bore the “souvenirs of blows from a policeman’s whip?’

As this Vancouver incident suggests, citizens disagreed about how  much tolerance should be given to the annual Halloween revel. Some clearly demanded better police protection from Halloween pranksters, for the calls to the stations in cities like Toronto and Vancouver ran into double, even triple figures every year. In rural areas, in particular, where the mayhem on Halloween might seemed especially threatening,a few householders even took the law into their own hands.

In 1933, for example, a farmer from Uxbridge, Ontario, fired at pranksters who threw stones on the roof of his house, wounding one of them. In the same year, another farmer from the same district, besieged by a gang of revelers who peppered his farmstead with stones, opened fire repeatedly, wounding five young men aged fifteen to twenty-five years.

In Welland, too, where a gang of youths bombarded a home in Cook’s Mills with apples as a climax to its Halloween pranks, two men were injured by gunshots in the ensuing affray. Four years later, in Southey, Saskatchewan, a seventy-one-year-old man shot dead one of the pranksters who was pestering him, having repeatedly warned them to leave his property. In isolated rural districts, where rowdies cruised farms in trucks and where farmers had firearms handy, confrontations could be tragically bloody.

Shootings on Halloween made good news copy. So, too, did the tales of fatal accidents and fires that accompanied the pranks of the night. While these stories undoubtedly exaggerated the mayhem of the holiday, they probably reinforced the idea that Halloween had to be tamed and modernized, at least among security-sensitive citizens. This could not be accomplished by the traditional forms of crowd control, for police forces were always stretched to capacity on this annual mischief night. It had to be effected by community groups who strove to channel youthful energies into more respectable, law-abiding activities.

All manner of clubs and societies went out of their way to provide alternative events for Halloween. Lions, Rotarians, Kiwanis, religious groups, high schools, boys’ and girls’ clubs, women’s institutes, the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire, and even the Sons of the American Revolution all rose to meet the challenge of rendering Halloween safe and sane during the interwar years.

“Halloween – From Pagan Ritual To Party Night” by Nicholas Rogers