Today in History: Snow White Anniversary

​Though the sources conflict on which date Snow White was re-released for its 50th anniversary in 1987, I’m going with this one, August 2. Because why not? It was sometime this summer anyway.

Halloweens were big holiday celebrations for us when the kids were growing up. Dressing the kids up in themes entertained me and gave me something exciting to do in the midst of the day-to-day challenges of parenting. I got to be crafty, creative, and just have a whole lot of fun. Planning it all out was quite enjoyable, and once the costumes were finished, the kids played dress-up in them to their hearts’ content.
 
The year we did Snow White, it started with each of the boys choosing which of the dwarfs they wanted to be. We were going to go with Snow White and the Three Dwarfs, pretending maybe the other four were still down in the coal mine. I was using a stuffed doll dwarf one of my sisters had for the guide to make the costumes. I didn’t use patterns. They were too expensive. I bought the cheapest fabric I could find, often using pieces from the reduced remnant bin in stores or inexpensive lining fabrics, and zippers or buttons from worn out clothes that still had good parts. For the dwarfs, I found some inexpensive fuzzy polyester in the colors that matched the dwarf doll. Then once the whole project got rolling, my sister bought more dolls so that each of my kids could also carry a doll, thus rounding up the total count of dwarfs back to their original seven. Lucky for them, they didn’t have to stay in the coal mine and miss Halloween!
 
Friends had fun along with us. A friend of my sister’s flew in from the East Coast a couple of years in order to see the kids and go Trick or Treating with us. She dressed up too, with complimentary characters to our themes, like Figaro, Geppetto’s cat for when we did Pinocchio. Another friend always found collector Christmas ornaments for us in our themes, including beautiful china five-inch figurines of Dorothy, the Tin Man, Lion, and Scarecrow. And the year we did Snow White, Jason’s boss Karen helped us with her tricky fancy sewing machine that could do lettering, embroidering the names onto the hats of each of the boys. She also became inspired to play along by dressing up as a remarkably scary rendition of the Wicked Witch. The kids laughed—a little—but kept at a distance. You can see in the picture how they are each hanging back just a little, even though that apple is as tempting as it surely was for Snow White.