Your Halloween Costume Does Not Need a Shipping Confirmation
How to thrift, swap, scavenge, and generally have a better Halloween without buying a pile of plastic crap.
Confession: I have absolutely been the person standing in a pop-up Halloween store at the last possible minute, surrounded by polyester wigs and plastic pitchforks, paying an unreasonable amount of money to become something I would be for approximately four hours.
Maybe you have too.
Halloween has somehow become another holiday where we are encouraged to buy an entire collection of things specifically designed to become irrelevant the next day.
Costumes. Decorations. Candy bowls. Fake spiderwebs. Tiny plastic skeletons. More tiny plastic skeletons. A 14-foot animatronic werewolf that your neighbor just had to have.
I say boo to that.
Halloween doesn't have to become an environmental horror story.
In fact, the slightly scrappier version is usually more fun.
First, the Actually Scary Part
Americans are expected to spend $13.5 billion on Halloween in 2026.
Yes. Billion. With a B.
According to the National Retail Federation's 2026 Halloween survey, $4.4 billion of that will go to costumes alone. Seventy-one percent of Halloween shoppers plan to buy costumes this year.
That's a whole lot of money for something many of us will wear for approximately four hours.
And while there isn't good current U.S. data telling us exactly how many of those costumes will eventually end up in a landfill—or precisely how much plastic is hiding beneath all those capes, wigs, and inflatable dinosaur tails—we know we're buying an enormous amount of stuff for a very short-lived occasion.
Here's the part I like, though: we're apparently starting to figure this out. When asked what they'd do if Halloween prices were higher than expected, 34% of U.S. consumers said they'd look for things they could reuse in future years or
repurpose for something else.
Don't buy a new costume.
Or at least don't make that your first move.
Shop Your Own Closet First
Before Amazon. Before Target. Before the giant temporary Halloween store appears overnight in the abandoned Bed Bath & Beyond like some sort of seasonal fungus, open your closet.
Your regular clothes are costume supplies.
Black dress? Witch, vampire, Wednesday Addams, haunted Victorian woman who definitely knows what happened in the attic.
Flannel + jeans? Lumberjack. Scarecrow. Person who moved to Vermont and now puts maple syrup in their morning coffee.
Khakis + button-down? Park ranger. Paleontologist. Zookeeper. (Also my husband on 98% of his workdays.)
Old bridesmaid dress?
You already know what must be done. Zombie prom queen.
The goal isn't necessarily to create the most elaborate costume. It's to look at things you already own differently. (Which, coincidentally, is a pretty useful sustainability skill the other 364 days of the year too.)
Then Go Thrifting
Thrift stores in October are magnificent chaos.
Don't walk in looking exclusively for a complete costume. Look for ingredients.
A weird velvet jacket. An old prom dress. A trench coat. Suspenders.
A straw hat. A truly questionable 1987 floral nightgown.
Congratulations. You are halfway to something.
And don't skip the toy section. Old dress-up clothes, plastic swords, crowns, capes, costume jewelry, and inexplicable accessories can turn regular clothes into an actual costume.
Field Tip: Start with the weirdest thing you find and build the costume around it. Creativity works surprisingly well backward.
Borrow Before You Buy
Somewhere near you is a person with a plastic tote containing approximately seventeen years of Halloween costumes.
Find that person.
Kids outgrow costumes constantly. Adults buy costumes for one party and never wear them again. Schools, theater departments, grandparents, neighbors, and friends all have costume pieces sitting around doing absolutely nothing.
So swap them.
A neighborhood costume swap can be as simple as: Bring costumes your family has outgrown. Put them on tables. Take something someone else brought.
No elaborate rules. No matching dollar values. No committee meeting.
Add cider and donuts if you want people to hang around.
Now you've turned Halloween shopping into a community event and kept perfectly usable stuff in circulation.
That's a win-win-win with fake blood on it.
Make Something Delightfully Ridiculous
DIY costumes don't have to involve sewing machines, professional makeup, or six hours of watching someone on YouTube construct articulated dragon wings.
Low effort can still be excellent.
Moth to a Flame: Wear brown, gray, or tan. Make cardboard wings. Carry a flashlight. Spend the evening being inexplicably drawn toward porch lights.
Ceiling Fan: Wear athletic gear and carry some pompoms and a sign reading GO CEILINGS!
It's terrible.
And so good.
Compost Pile: Brown clothes + paper leaves + cardboard vegetable scraps. Bonus points for periodically explaining decomposition to people who did not ask.
404: Costume Not Found: White shirt. Marker. Done.
Weather Forecast: Blue shirt covered in cotton-ball clouds. Carry a spray bottle. Chance of rain: extremely high.
National Park Tourist: Hiking clothes, binoculars, water bottle, and an aggressively large trail map. Stop periodically and ask everyone if they've seen the bathroom.
Campfire: Brown pants, red/orange/yellow fabric or paper flames, and a few cardboard logs. No permission slip needed.
Cardboard Is Basically Halloween Gold
Before buying foam board, plastic props, or elaborate decorations, raid the recycling bin.
Cardboard can become: A robot. A television. A vending machine. A campsite sign. A dinosaur head. A gravestone. A book cover. A spaceship. A very convincing piece of toast.
It can also become Halloween decorations, which means the giant box your last online order arrived in has finally found its purpose.
Just remember: if you want the cardboard recyclable afterward, skip glitter, plastic coatings, and excessive tape.
The Best Halloween Stuff Already Exists
This is really the point. The greenest Halloween costume probably isn't the one marketed as “eco-friendly." It's the pirate shirt your neighbor bought six years ago. It's your kid's old witch hat. It's the cardboard box in the garage. It's the absurd velvet jacket at Goodwill. It's the costume you wore last year with completely different accessories. It's something you make together at the kitchen table while arguing about whether a cereal box can structurally support six pipe-cleaner spider legs.
Sustainability doesn't require turning Halloween into a joyless exercise in environmental purity. Keep the candy. Carve the pumpkin. Wear something ridiculous. Scare your neighbors. Just look around at what you already have before buying another cartful of stuff destined for the trash.
Because Halloween should be spooky. The waste doesn't have to be.
