Originality has never been the hallmark of the Lloyd household on Oct. 31. Greg and I have always had the kids do the saint thing.

While we realize that Halloween has gone the way of most holidays — from pagan to Catholic and back again — we still want our daughters to have a little fun.

The annual challenge is coming up with fresh ideas.

How to help your kids come up with fun costumes that not only won't scare anyone, but also could end up evangelizing the neighborhood? Maybe you can learn from our experiences — not to mention our more recent brainstorming.

The first two options that scream “pick me” when you have girls are the Blessed Mother or a nun. But I've always hesitated. Nuns are already fodder for caricature. It wouldn't do if people thought we were making fun of them. When we have done them, we've picked out specific sisters — St. Thérèse of Lisieux (complete with roses and cross) and Elizabeth Seton, for example.

When it comes to the Blessed Mother, specialization is also the key. Guadalupe and LaSalette are rich in imagery. So are the metaphoric titles in the Litany of Loretto — Gate of Heaven, Seat of Wisdom, Ark of the Covenant. (Our problem here is that we lack basic carpentry skills.)

Otherwise, there are only so many nuns, so many blue-and-white Mary bathrobes and so many generically robed saints that can be done before boredom sets in. To add to the difficulty, our possibilities are cut in half. I've tried, but none of the girls wants to play John the Baptist. And that's with or without the platter.

The Old Testament opens up a whole world of possibilities. I've always had a hankering to be Moses myself. Well, for an hour or two, anyway. It's easy enough to fashion a long beard, white hair, bushy eyebrows and the telltale stone tablets just in case the neighbors don't get it. Recycle the wig and eyebrows, and you can do Noah, with dove on shoulder and a bottomless cardboard boat carried about the hips. A little clumsy for collecting (or, in my case, handing out) candy, but very cool and very original.

Themes help. One year, we did the Fatima kids. Two girls went as Lucia and Jacinta; the other consented to go as Francisco, carrying a flute. The baby was a lamb.

Next, we rode the queen circuit. Plenty of possibilities there, starting with the biblical Esther, Elizabeth of Hungary and Zita of Austria. The pitfall is that, without precise period costumes and hair, they all look alike — even if their namesakes for the night lived hundreds of years apart.

Of course, there's always Kateri Tekakwitha. A lot of girls in our home-school group did her the year that Pocahontas costumes were in the stores. She's been fairly popular ever since. So much for originality.

One year, we branched off and did the virtues. This amounted to crafting a fairy princess based on the flower that matched the virtue (sunflower = faith, for instance). The dresses were gorgeous but, for some unfathomable reason, our adolescent found the whole thing humiliating.

The next year, we sent our kids as “occupations.” The idea was that there'd be a livelihood or station in life to match up with every patron saint. It turned out to be the first time our kids looked like the rest of the kids in the neighborhood. I still think the prospect holds promise. Want to be a street urchin? Matt Talbot's your man. A hiker? Giorgio Frassati. A pirate? Well, there must be some saint somewhere who is the patron saint of pirates. Repentant, of course.

Then the Holy Spirit threw me a lifeline. Everybody got hooked on The Lord of the Rings when the movies came out. The fact that J.R.R. Tolkien was a Catholic, along with the loosely allegorical bent of the books, was a godsend. I must admit our eldest, with her long blond hair slicked back, looked every bit the part when she dressed up as Legolas, the elven archer.

After that, we did C.S. Lewis's allegorical characters from The Chronicles of Narnia. I spied a lion costume on sale in a local department store. Aslan — a figure of Jesus, “not a tame lion” — was portrayed by our 2-year-old. It was the first Halloween costume I have ever purchased and, I must say, a blessed relief. Our second eldest was a Narnian tree spirit. The third took the part of Aravis the Tarkheena, and the fourth, her horse, Hwin. And to think I did it all with a glue gun. I offered our eldest the White Witch as a part of the theme but she chose instead to be a Narnian queen.

Looking into the future, I've already begun fermenting ideas for Halloweens to come. Thinking back to my childhood, when I one time painted a box to look like a pack of Wrigley's gum, gave me the idea of sending my children out as sacred objects. No patens or chalices, mind you. That would not be kosher. Things like an incense burner — add a little dry ice and think of the possibilities!

A friend suggested going as a soul in purgatory. A largish costume encased in “flames,” with a grimacing face barely breaking out. Sounds rather like a series of unfinished “Pieta” sculptures by Michelangelo that I once saw in Florence. Unique, imaginative and even kinda scary.

If you really want to be ghoulish, how about relics? I once was blessed by St. Fidelis’ skull. If wearing a skull with a reliquary around it provokes asphyxiation, try St. Ignatius's arm. It's in a golden arm-shaped reliquary in the Church of the Gesu in Rome.

So has all of this served the cause of evangelization? Well, one lady did recognize our midget version of St. Thérèse and was properly edified. Largely, however, nobody notices.

One year, to counter the ignorance, my husband had the girls sing “For All the Saints” at every house. They came back an hour later with seven pieces of candy. Our adolescent had even fewer. Even candy couldn't induce her to take part. That was almost our last Halloween but for the pledge I exacted from Greg under threat of torture.

We've managed, lo these umpteen Halloweens, to stick to our guns on our Catholicity — in spite of hints by our more mainstream Catholic friends that such a thing would be no fun and horribly uncreative.

Last year, the kids surprised us by asking for a return of the saints this year. They spoke of the costumes they had loved — Kateri, Guadalupe, Seton. I was floored. Just think — to them, the saints have always been fun.

Susie Lloyd, author of Please Don't Drink the Holy Water! Homeschool Days, Rosary Nights and Other Near Occasions of Sin (Sophia), writes from Allentown, Pennsylvania.