The easiest Halloween costume is something thrown together from the thrift store. If that is your plan for your costume this year, you need to get to the thrift store NOW! If you wait until two days before Halloween, you will be sorely disappointed because the thrift store will be a picked over shell of what it was earlier in the month.

Even the easiest thing in the world to find (like a suit coat that you don’t mind ripping, tearing and destroying) might be difficult to find in your size because the thrift stores sell a lot of their inventory in the month of October. Your plaid coat for your Used Car Salesman costume went out the door in the early days of October underneath the arm of someone who planned a little more than you did.

So, if you want an easy costume this year, you can do it. You just need to do it NOW instead of a couple days before Halloween. If you need some ideas for easy costumes ideas, here are some links:

• About.com – Make Your Own Halloween Costume – Free Creative Halloween Costume Ideas: Lots of good ideas here.

• Homemade Halloween Costumes – easy and cheap!: Lots of great ideas for costumes made out of thrift store clothing. Mute your computer before you click on the link unless you want to hear Grim Grinning Ghosts on a harpsichord.

• Costume Idea Zone: A very professional site with costume ideas. There are commercials for BuyCostumes.com, but there are also some good ideas here.

All of these sites are desperately in need of pictures to augment their descriptions. It’s a lot easier to see the costume with a picture. Here is a group of pictures of costumes, but they’re not all homemade. It’s great for some ideas, though.

• Flickr: The Halloween Costumes Pool

The funnest part of Halloween is that for one day, you can be whatever you ever wanted to be. If you want to be scary, powerful, sexy or funny, you get to choose. That’s the truth every day of the year, but we tend to forget that. With Halloween, we get to remember what it is we want to be.