Christmas Fancy Dress

Christmas is a great time for parties, whether it is just a quick night out with friends or the official office bash, and to make things even more festive you can have fun dressing up in costumes and outfits. Festive fancy dress costumes ideal for Christmas include classic red and white Santa suits, and you can buy plenty of different types of Santa outfits for both boys and girls from Buycostumes.com, including a historical Victorian Santa outfit and also a very cute mini velvet baby and toddler Santa suit for the little ones. You can also get loads of other great Christmas costumes on this site including a reindeer suit, snowman costumes for adults and children, and many other classic fancy dress outfits such as princesses, superheroes, cowboys and Indians and cheerleaders.

If you are on a tight budget and feeling creative it is easy to make a cheap and effective Santa suit at home. The materials you will need are:

• Large sized red sweat suit.
• Faux white fur (or any fluffy white material such as chenille)
• 4 large black buttons
• Black boots
• Elastic
• Large black belt
• Pillow
• Santa Hat
• Red Sack

Firstly lay the jumper part of the sweat suit out flat and sew or glue a large strip of the white fur up the middle to the collar. Sew or glue another strip all the way around the bottom, and also on the cuffs and collar. Next fix the large black buttons to the strip up the front of the shirt, to finish the fake ‘jacket’ look. Lay out the trousers and fix some white strips around the bottoms, and if you don’t mind getting glue on your black boots then glue white strips to the tops of these as well.

To make a Santa beard just cut a large beard shape pattern out of your white material, leaving a hole for the mouth, (if you have a thinner white material you may have to cut two beard shapes out and glue them together to make it thicker). Sew or glue some elastic to the top of the beard, so that you can loop it around your head to hold it in place.

Now put on the suit and stuff the pillow up the front (this is why you need it a couple of sizes too big) and use the black belt to hold the pillow in place. It is usually cheaper and easier to buy a Santa hat around Christmas time then to bother making one, but if you do want to have a go then there are some instructions on this site:  www.howtomakeahat.com/santa-hat/.:)