I've lived overseas for 9 years and of 5 of them, I and the kids went trick or treating at Halloween. What I learned is that if you're not so crafty (like me), you must buy your Halloween costumes well in advance. If you're one of the lucky ones who can sew and make their kids' costumes from scratch.....GOOD FOR YOU :P lol I'm not hating, I promise. Ok, maybe I am.
I made my son's costume when he was 5 and whilst trick-or-treating, he made me promise to never ever make another costume for him again. My daughter loved her cat costume and still remembers it to this day. My son has nightmares about his however.....dang where did I go wrong.
As I am scouring through pinterest looking for costume and decorating ideas, it struck me that maybe I should share with my fellow military families, the newbies at least, my experiences with Halloween costumes. I had plenty of time to get things totally WRONG. So learn from my mistakes! Trust me. Living here in Japan now hopefully we learned our lesson!
TIP #1Make sure your kids are totally sure who/what they want to be by early-mid September. There aren't a lot of great choices at the PX/BX and if there are any they're whisked away with a quickness like anything else that's awesome overseas. And people often buy multiples of the same dang costume and they only have one kid!
So look online now in August, like me. My daughter wants to be Frankie Stein from Monster High and my boys want to be Mario and Luigi.....again. But of course they outgrew last year's costumes and they wore their costumes all day everyday so they look too tattered to wear this year anyway if they were to fit well.
(www.buycostumes.com)TIP #2In the last couple years I've lived in Germany they extended their costumes choices from clowns, 'indians', witches, princesses, and cowboys to way more mainstream choices. I saw a few different costume choices at stores, but there aren't nearly as many choices as there are in America. They don't really do Halloween like Americans do and I am sure the Japanese don't either. Though in Germany it's definitely becoming bigger and they have the AWESOME Fasching in February.
(I bought my son this Iron Man costume shortly after the Ghost-Gate 2010 to get a head start on Halloween 2011, however he wore this to his Kindergarten's Fasching Party)TIP#3Order before mid September because even online they run out of costumes and the orders may take longer because the high influx of orders coming in! If you live off base you can order from costume sites from stores in that country like in Germany, I used amazon.de and amazon.co.uk often but there aren't a lot of choices, even there are it's extremely expensive from my experience.TIP#4If you don't want to buy a costume, make your own. There are a lot of websites to get tips from. My daughter was a cat in 2010. I just bought black tights, a black tutu, a friend of mine made ears which she glued to a headband and my daughter loved. www.parents.com have a lot of tips that I've used. From cakes to costumes they have a lot of fun easy DIY projects that I like. I love when easy and DIY are in the same sentence, don't you? But if you want something a bit different, make sure you know what you're going to do and buy and missing supplies in advance, because crafty things also move fast at BXs/Craft stores on base. Look off base but make sure you know where to go. You can also buy accessories online, but again, make sure you plan ahead.
(my daughter going for seconds on treats)TIP#5If ordering from Amazon and you're ordering in September or October (eek) make sure you order from Amazon and not another company. It'll take alot longer. Just order from the outside company directly, it's usually faster unless stated otherwise.TIP#6Walmart, Party City, Target (it depends sometimes they do not ship some costumes to APO addresses for whatever reason) and Amazon ships pretty quickly. But shop around because there often deals where'd you wouldn't expect!
(Costumes purchased from www.walmart.com however the boys want to switch it up this year and it's ot available on walmart this year so far. Keep looking out, though!)TIP#7Have FUN!!!!!!!!! And make sure your kids know you get 10% of the candy loot since you're doing all of this work and all. 
Hope this was helpful! Have a great Halloween!!!
