Life & Place · A Decembers list

Every costume you pulled together and wore out the door

The year you cut eyeholes in a bedsheet an hour before trick-or-treating. The year your mother stayed up sewing felt scales onto a dragon suit. Some were clever, some were a coat and a hat and a good story.

This is the list for all of them. One line for the thrown-together ones, a few more for the year you really committed.

Add your first costume

Free to start. Private from the first word.

Where this list lives

This is a list in Decembers — the place a life gets written down one question at a time.

Decembers asks the questions no one thought to ask, keeps the answers in one permanent Chronicle, and holds them on one Timeline that reads in order. You answer. Decembers does the writing.

Lists
A list for every kind of life, and every turn one takes. Pick one and start answering.
Timeline
Your answers arrange themselves in order. Seeing a whole life laid out this way is something else.
Inner Circle
Not social media. The few people you name are the only ones it is ever shared with.
See a sample Timeline

Begin with one list. The rest follows.

One line is enough

Write down the year you were a robot in a spray-painted refrigerator box, and the whole night comes back — the tape on your arms, who painted the dials, the way you couldn't sit in the car.

No photograph ever caught the costumes that mattered most. The camera came out for the good years, the store-bought superhero, the dance recital getup — and never for the year you improvised a fortune teller out of every scarf in the house twenty minutes before the doorbell rang. Those are the ones only you remember, right down to whose idea it was and how it fell apart by nine o'clock.

A costume is a small honest record of who you were that fall: what you thought was funny, who you were trying to be, who sat at the kitchen table helping you glue and pin. You will never write a whole chapter about a paper-plate mask. But you'll write one line, and then another, and before long the list holds the shy year, the show-off year, the year you and a friend went as a matched pair and only half the party got the joke.

How it works

  1. 01

    Pick this list

    It’s waiting, already written. There is no blank page to face.

  2. 02

    Fill in what comes

    A year, a line, a photograph. Five minutes or an hour.

  3. 03

    Invite who was there

    They add what you forgot. You decide what stays.

  4. 04

    Share it, or don’t

    One quiet page for your Inner Circle. No link, no feed.

The costumes that come back first

The last-minute ones

A black cat drawn on with your sister's eyeliner. A ghost from a sheet, a devil from a red sweatshirt and a headband with horns. These took ten minutes and no money, and somehow they're the ones you can still see clearest — because you made them from whatever the house had.

The ones someone made for you

The clown suit your grandmother sewed, the princess dress with the real hoop skirt, the astronaut helmet your dad built out of a bucket and foil. Someone spent hours on these, and wearing it was half pride, half the fear of getting it dirty before the night was over.

The ones you overthought

The costume nobody recognized without an explanation. The clever pun you were sure would land. The elaborate build that fell apart on the walk to the party. You still defend it, and you'd do it again.

Decade by decade

1960s
Plastic dime-store masks with the thin elastic band, or a sheet ghost, and a pillowcase to carry the loot through the whole neighborhood after dark.
1970s
Store-bought costumes in a box with the cellophane window, or homemade hobos and hippies from whatever was in the closet.
1980s
The big pop-culture years — you or your kids went as movie characters, cartoon heroes, and whatever was on every lunchbox that fall.
1990s
Adult Halloween parties took over, and the costumes got funnier and more elaborate, built for a room full of grown-ups instead of a candy route.
2000s
Group costumes and couples' getups, the matched theme with friends or coworkers that took real planning and a group text to pull off.
2010s
The office contest, the pet dressed to match, the year you finally reused a costume and nobody was the wiser.

Other lists you may like

Start with any one of them. Every answer lands on the same Timeline.

Begin

A record of every character you climbed into for one night

Start with the one you remember best — the sheet, the box, the dress that itched. Write that line down, and the rest of the costumes will come knocking.

Add your first costume