WNY’s 5 Favorite Places In The 80’s & 90’s To Get Halloween Costumes

Do you remember what it was like trying to pick out a Halloween costume in the 80's & 90's? In Western New York, we would always check out these places first.

Halloween was so much fun back then

Halloween was different when we were growing up. It felt like there weren't as many rules back then. We would wear our costumes to school, and then the second school was over, it was trick-or-treating time. We could start as soon as we got off the bus and go until everyone turned their lights out. There weren't designated trick-or-treat times (at least that I can remember). If you didn't have a pile of candy as high as your shins, or at least a pretty full bag from Tops, you were doing it wrong.

Of course, we still had to let our parents check it before we were able to dig in. It felt like there were way more people putting needles and razor blades in candy just to hurt little kids like us. Thank God our parents were there to stop them!

Planning your costume

One of two things would happen when we were planning our costumes. We would either start planning as soon as we started heading back to school or we would start planning the night before Halloween and just throw something together with whatever we could find in the house. Normally I did the second one.

I was always really grateful to have my sister, but especially around Halloween. She has always been the artistic one and she was awesome with painting faces and planning costumes. Sometimes, she would start a dry run on a costume a month before just to make sure we had all the stuff we needed.

Buying your costume

Some years, we were lucky enough, we'd be able to buy our costume at a store. Whnen I was really young they used to have these plastic mask & costume combos. The mask had a rubberband strap that would go aroud your head, and normally it would break or come free from the staple on the side in minutes. Then you'd end up carrying it around and having to tell people who you were. But like I said, we normally just put costumes together from what we had at the house. There were a lot of clowns, gypsies, and hobos in my childhood.

I'll never forget the wall of latex masks at some of these stores, though. Spencers was my favorite place. Toys R Us was a close second. There were TONS of them. They had everything from whoever the current president was to super scary $100 masks to old men. They were crazy to see and it was amazing how they could transform people.

We would go from store to store trying to find the perfect one. Sometimes it would take an entire weekend to put the perfect costume together. Then we'd end up having to put on a snowsuit over the top of the whole thing anyway because it would be so cold.

Did you have a favorite place to get your costumes as a kid? Here are some of the most popular places we would go to get ours: