Ben and I have always loved Halloween. Since we’ve been together, we’ve hosted parties each year, getting all dressed up in couples costumes. Our parties have ranged from Clue-themed to a night filled with board games to a night filled with just plain drinking. But each party includes a few basics.
First, everyone has to wear a costume. Absolutely mandatory. And our friends have pulled out some really creative costumes. One year, our friends Kelly and Carson dressed up like Bob Ross and one of his paintings. The next year they dressed up like Napoleon Dynamite and Pedro. Our other friends, Elizabeth and Shelton, dressed up like “sandwiches” – Shelton was an actual sandwich and Elizabeth was a Sand Witch, with a sandcastle nestled in her witch’s hat. People still talk about those costumes, which won our prize for that year, by the way.
That’s the other basic. Prizes. Usually, we go with Boo-Berry cereal or something along those lines. Simple but thematic and fun. We can’t have a costume contest without good prizes.
As for the two of us, we like to put a lot of thought into our costumes. One year I was Belle and he was Gaston (easier to dress like Gaston than the beast). One year I was Doc and he was Marty from Back to the Future. One year I was Velma and he was Shaggy. We tried to dress our dog up like the Mystery Machine but she kept climbing out of her costume. She was not a fan.
The first day we met, we went to a haunted house together with some of my (who became our) friends. When we got engaged, we decided to have our engagement pictures taken at that same haunted house. It felt right.
And after giving it some thought and talking it through, we decided to get married on Halloween. It worked out well – when we got engaged, we knew we’d need to save for the wedding. Halloween 2020 was two and a half years away, giving us plenty of time to save and allowing us to get married on a Saturday. Things just seemed to line up perfectly. I mean, Halloween only falls on a Saturday once in a blue moon.
My goal with these posts to is to chronicle the planning process, from picking a dress to picking an aesthetic to choosing accessories and everything else that goes along with planning a Halloween wedding.