My three-year-old has bold ambitions for Halloween

To some extent, this feels like a Rubicon being crossed, since each of her previous Halloween costumes has been decidedly less voluntary. We’ve basically thought of a funny or cheap thing to dress her as – and then done it. Now, at the grand old age of three, she’s less content to be treated like a passably sentient dolly, paraded to our satisfaction with little awareness of her own.

As well as the mildly melancholic sense that she’s growing up, this also presents other problems. I’m not against her dressing as Baby Shark for aesthetic or cultural reasons, nor am I the sort of parent who might prefer to dress their child up as, say, Björk, Marie Curie, or Lyndon B Johnson. (Although, now that I’ve written those three options down, the temptation is overwhelming.) It’s just that we do not have the requisite materials at home to make her a Baby Shark costume, which means I’ll have to buy one.

My reluctance to do this is, at least partly, because I quite enjoy making costumes, as anyone who saw last year’s Miss Rachel (dungarees and a pink headband) or my son’s The Snail & The Whale costume (a grey jumper with a £2 plastic mollusc attached with Sellotape) can attest. But, I have to admit, the main reason I lament having to buy a costume is because I’m a bit of a miser and resent shelling out money for something she’ll only wear once. This, my more eagle-eyed acquaintances might have noted, goes some way to explaining my ardent backing of the fox option, since we have a fox onesie we got as a hand-me-down for my son some years ago, which has spent four years gathering dust and which I’d like to get one last wear from before she gets too big for it.

A cursory glance at the options online for “baby shark costume three-year-old” suggests prices (£19.99) and quality (poor) that draw me back to her with the only response that seems reasonable – “So… foxes are cool, aren’t they?” – before she loudly shouts “BABY SHARK” and my wife tells me to stop being such a Scrooge and give the poor child what she wants.

An alternative plan comes to me that evening as I read her a bedtime story. It is, as usual, two books in Sue Hendra and Paul Linnet’s Supertato series, which chronicle the planet’s strongest and bravest potato superhero as he tackles his supermarket villain the Evil Pea. The books – and their accompanying TV series on CBeebies – are gloriously daft blasts of nonsense which crack us both up every night and it occurs to me that she has many bulky, beige items of clothing that I could easily fashion into a potato, given half a chance. With a strip of cloth for his trademark eye-mask and a blanket cape, I tell myself, she’d really look the part.

As I turn the pages, I casually mention how good a costume Supertato would make. She seems interested but, keen not to overplay my hand, I leave it at that. The next morning, I mention again – with the kind of easygoing elan usually reserved for members of the intelligence services – that Supertato really would be a great look for Halloween. “Yes,” she says, to my delight. “I dress as Supertato!” Overjoyed – albeit mildly disturbed – by my ability to incept this notion in her head, I tell her we can get to work on it any time she likes. Pencils and paper are produced and soon I’m drawing his distinctly oblong features perfectly.

Unfortunately, since she’s sitting perpendicular to me, her sideways vantage point means she sees the tall, upstanding tuber I’m drawing as a long, wide orb. Her eyes widen immediately. “Pumpkin!” she says, as another, better idea occurs to her, “I dress as pumpkin.” No, I tell her with something like mild panic, rotating the paper so she can see my – perfectly rendered – potato as it was meant. “Pumpkin!” she cries again as I attempt to place arms, legs, eyes and a cape in all the requisite places, and add shading in a last-ditch attempt to salvage my spurned spud.

“PUMPKIN!” she insists, planting a gummy little hand on the page and rotating it back so that my very-clearly-a-potato lies prone, in the posture of a tortoise that’s fallen on its side. “Mummy, I dress as pumpkin,” she says as my wife enters the room to find her daughter jubilant and her husband somewhat ashen-faced. She demands to hear “This Is Halloween” from Henry Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, with its “everyone hail to the pumpkin king” refrain, and is soon dancing in triumph.

My wife consoles me in my moment of failed inception and underappreciated draughtsmanship. “It’s what she wants,” she says, “and how expensive could a pumpkin costume really be?” She’s right, of course. It’s £19.99, if you are wondering.

Photograph Getty Images