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The Haunted Credit CardAn ode to store-bought Halloween costumes.

By Emily BazelonUpdated Saturday, Oct. 18, 2008, at 6:16 AM ET

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In this cheery, brothers-as-best-friends moment, I got a little carried away and started to click around for accessories. Paul protested. We had a pair of Harry Potter glasses somewhere, left over from a birthday party, didn't we? He managed to find them, minus one arm, and said we could repair them. But I was caught up in my vision, and put a new pair of glasses into the shopping cart. We could dye Simon's hair red, we decided, or draw on his head with a red marker. "And they can make their own wands," Paul finished. When the kids looked a little glum, he pointed out that they've played for months with the lightsabers they made out of rolled up newspapers (with the help of a clever babysitter). They went off to bed with the promise of posterboard and marker supplies.

But later, I went back to the Web site I'd found and discovered wands that lit up and made noises when you swipe them through the air. A bargain, I thought, at $10 each. I know, I know, this is why Halloween costume sales are expected to reach $1.82 billion this year, an increase from $1.5 billion just five years ago, according to the National Retail Foundation. There are many better ways to spend money, not to mention that my indulgence would only make it that much harder for the parents who can't shell out $35 per costume. And yet, those wands—wouldn't they get lots of use as toys after the holiday? More saliently, if I'm honest, wouldn't the kids be deliciously, sinfully thrilled when we pulled them out of the box?

Commentary about Halloween costumes tends to veer in one of two directions. There are the articles that promise that kids love homemade costumes best and try to goad you into making one with helpful hints about robot construction and Gypsy inspiration. "The key to a good costume was that Mom made it," one writer reminisces about the pumpkins and Power Rangers she sewed. This genre has found expression in a storybook, Gus and Grandpa and the Halloween Costume, in which Gus' parents refuse to buy him a store-bought costume, and Grandpa saves him by finding a costume that Grandma made for his father. The other kind of article mourns the disappearance of the lovingly pieced-together costume era and claims that, like Chuck E. Cheese birthday parties, store-bought superheroes are wrecking the real thing because kids inexplicably prefer them.

I don't know about that. At the annual Halloween parade at Eli's school, the costumes that merit finger-pointing and longing gazes are the ones that kids and parents come up with themselves. Harry Potter and Ron Weasley are fine; salt and pepper shakers made from boxes and tinfoil are truly cool. Even I had a superior Halloween moment once, when I got to be one of the five senses with my far more imaginative college roommates. But now that I'm left to my own boring devices, I'm grateful that buying off the rack no longer means settling for a cheap mask with a pinching elastic band and a plastic smock with a picture of what you're supposed to be. In contrast to my childhood memories, my kids and I can marvel at our brilliant, crafty friends without feeling humiliated. They get to be ingenious, and we get to be passable. Some other day, it'll be my turn to pull off homemade virtue—by baking birthday cupcakes from scratch, say. And if our friends and I are really lucky, our parental lapses will make us less likely to judge each other when we happen to be the one doing it right.

Paul bought the poster board he'd promised for the wands. There it sat on our dining room table, and then the Harry-Ron costume box arrived. The kids tore it open, and they loved their wands. Paul was ready to strangle me, but he couldn't, because we were trying to ban the killing curse and teach Simon to say lumos and leviosa instead. I pointed out that at least these useless plastic objects appear to have staying power—for as long as we have AA batteries. The robes, meanwhile, are soft and cozy, and Eli and Simon announced that they will double as bathrobes. So now I really feel smug: $60 bought me Halloween peace of mind, and a winter of warm nights. Selling out and feeling good.