Family character: Editor’s countless costumes bring back many happy memories of spending Halloween with family

Halloween is one of our family’s favorite holidays. And like a lot of things we love, we aren’t super subtle about it.

It’s way more than just over-decorating our house, which is overkill enough that you can see our home’s purple hue more than 2 miles away on the highway. (It’s an added bonus that it annoys our HOA.) Or handing out full-sized candy bars. Which, of course, we would do … if we were home.

So, if we love Halloween so much, why wouldn’t we be at home to give out the good stuff?

Going to Disneyland or Disney World to celebrate Halloween was such a tradition in our family that our kids only thought it was unusual if we weren’t with Mickey and friends on Oct. 31 every year. That’s past tense because we basically stopped doing it, for all sorts of reasons, once we moved to Spokane about a decade ago.

If you’ve never been to one of the Disney parks’ Halloween parties, they are almost certainly more than you are expecting – both in what you’re going to experience and what you’re going to pay. Even scarier, they sell out super quickly, and you do not want to see what those tickets resell for. Even Taylor Swift would be shocked.

Yes, there is the kind of trick-or-treating that easily makes a kid the envy of the neighborhood. But that’s not really why you go to a Disney park for Halloween. There are different, over-the-top parades and fireworks. Characters you rarely see roaming the parks are out in their favorite costumes, and there are bunches of other special and spooky things that only happen on those nights.

One of the biggest things that’s different than most other trips to the House of Mouse is that these special parties are the only times guests can wear costumes in the theme parks.

And for many guests, these aren’t normal costumes. Families go all out.

No one is buying their costumes at Target or Spirit Halloween. Some of these costumes are so well-done that they are given special stickers to wear that tells other park visitors that this isn’t an official park character.

The costumes are super creative. Almost certainly custom. Likely themed across all family members. And definitely not something you just throw on a few minutes before heading to the park. Serious planning and budgeting goes into many of the costumes you see people wear at these parties.

Our family was the same. We took this pretty darn seriously.

Back when our kids were little, we began talking about our costume ideas in the middle of the summer. Once we knew who we wanted to dress as, the planning and preparations began for all the different pieces of the costume. Then was the really hard part: finding someone, or some ones, to help sew it, paint it, sculpt it or even build a custom leather coat exactly the same as the one Chris Pratt wore in “Guardians of the Galaxy.”

It then became an anxious waiting game to see if all of the pieces arrived before Halloween. Which is why we started the whole process in the middle of the summer.

All of this also meant these costumes were typically nice enough they could be worn again and again. Well, except our kids always outgrew them before the next year, and there were even concerns they might already be bigger in October than they were in July when we ordered the costumes.

Except for me. With the exception of putting on a few pounds some years, my costumes could basically be saved and worn for decades.

And they have.

That explains why I have so many Halloween costumes. It also explains why they’re all pretty darn good. But there’s another reason why I’ve kept them all these years.

Making Halloween memories isn’t just little kids’ stuff. These are core memories that resonate as much, if not more, for parents. Especially when your little ones grow up and start to have their own little ones.

When so many of your family’s favorite memories are tied to moments experienced year after year, becoming traditions, it’s hard to not hold on, to cherish something that takes you back to those shared moments.

That’s why you see me in costume more than probably any other editor on the planet – though former Seattle Times editor Don Shelton loves to throw on a crazy costume almost as much as I do.

For me, it’s not about reliving childhood memories. It’s about wanting to relive those magical memories from my kids’ childhoods.

So even when my own children had outgrown trick-or-treating in fantastic outfits, those old costumes certainly made other kids happy. Here in Spokane. When you see Olaf the snowman at a Spokane Indians game on Princess night, that is almost certainly my costume. It might even be me in it.

If you ever saw me ringing the Salvation Army bell in front of our newspaper’s building on a cold day in November, dressed as Jack Skellington, it was not only to raise money for people who could use a little help during the holidays but also to make sure the Spokane Symphony’s concert for “The Nightmare Before Christmas” has the biggest possible audience.

One of our newspaper’s traditions that began long before I arrived was inviting children to trick-or-treat in our newsroom every Halloween. We’re totally doing it again this afternoon from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., which will give me another reason to dress up in one of my costumes for our young visitors – though it seems like our reporters get a bigger kick out of the goofiness of it all than the youngsters do.

The wild part is that I had a completely new costume made this year. It’s the first Halloween costume I’ve had that isn’t tied to Disney. And that’s because it’s tied to Spokane. Kind of.

It starts with Spokesman-Review legend, and New York Times-bestselling author, Jess Walter. At our Northwest Passages event with him this summer, he told a story of following Evel Knievel around one night as the bone-breaking motorcycle daredevil legend jumped from bar to bar in Spokane, instead of jumping buses.

His story was so fantastic on so many levels that it made me wonder if there shouldn’t be a custom leather jumpsuit in my life for Halloween this year.

It even caused a wonderful moment where those past memories collided to create new memories.

There’s a point in the life of a dad when you realize your daughter will never dress like a princess again, with you putting her on your shoulders as you both watch the magic of fireworks over a pretend castle. Until it happens again in an even better way.

A few weeks ago, our family returned to a Halloween party at the Disneyland Resort together, only this time with my daughter and her husband. She was dressed like Cinderella. In that moment, I was taken right back to walking those same sidewalks with her little hand in my hand. The memories washed over me.

Time after time that night, she told me how much being there together meant to her, and that she loved that her husband finally got to see what it was like to celebrate Halloween with the Curleys. She kept laughing and smiling at me in my ridiculous red, white and blue striped leather get-up. We took what seemed like a million photos together.

That’s when it hit me that these new memories of our family celebrating our favorite holiday together might mean even more to me now.

There also was the realization that very few kids know who Evel Knievel is. Instead, they freaked out that Duke Caboom from “Toy Story” was there.

And that explains why Evel Knievel will be making his spectacular return to Spokane today: There now is another costume that completely takes me back to celebrating our family’s favorite holiday together.