Smith: Tiny Sonoma County costume shop bustling as Halloween approaches

Christy Huish appeared for work the other day in a red corset, a lacy little black skirt, white-and-black striped socks, heels and a billowy white, off-the-shoulders blouse.

She was simply showing off the merchandise at one of Sonoma County’s more unusual, tucked-away costume shops. The build-up to Halloween is the busiest and happiest time of the year for her and her mother’s Backdoor Costume Rentals.

Most of the year, the shop is open by appointment only. But in October, it becomes a seven-day-a-week party emporium.

“It seems like Halloween will never get here,” said Huish, a Santa Rosa High alum and mother of a 13-year-old son, Cory. “Then it arrives and it’s gone in an instant.”

The roots of the costume shop, now located on rural Piezzi Road west of Santa Rosa, reach back to when Huish was a kid at Lincoln Elementary and her mom, Karen, outfitted her with handmade get-ups for Halloween and other school dress-up occasions.

“We always won the costume contest,” said Christy Huish, now 42.

Her mother began making costumes and accessories for other family members, then for friends. More than 30 years ago, Karen Huish, now 62, opened Backdoor Costume Rentals at what was then her family’s home on West College Avenue.

Some of the costumes that burden the racks at the shop at Karen Huish’s new home on Piezzi Road are thrift-store or yard-sale finds. But, said her daughter and longtime business partner, “I’d ?say 90 percent of them are homemade.”

All these years, Adeline Malecha, who’s 88, has helped her daughter and granddaughter with the costume shop. They have the clothes organized largely by theme: pirate, Renaissance, Egyptian, Roman, what have you.

Christy and Karen Huish savor the challenge of listening to a customer’s vision and sending him or her out the door with a complete ensemble that may well include jewelry, weaponry, a wig, beard, hat, tights and shoes.

“I love dressing up people,” Christy Huish said. “I would dress up every day if I could.”

She said most customers will pay $55 to $65 for an outfit, and they don’t have to worry about walking into a party and spying someone else wearing the same thing.

Though Halloween is peak season for the shop, Huish said there’s always something going on that ?has people shopping for costumes.

“We have 10 different Easter bunnies,” she said, as well as a selection of Santa Clauses. Her shop will receive calls, too, in advance of themed birthday parties, Renaissance fairs, balls, corporate events and Burning Man.

Not everybody likes dressing up and perhaps assuming a new identity now and then, but everybody in Christy Huish’s family does.

“When we go Christmas shopping, we dress in elves’ costumes,” she said.

How she loves Halloween. “It’s the one day to let go and become someone else,” she said.

The day after the fantasy of Halloween, Huish will return to being a woman who works with her mother and grandmother at a costume shop in the country.

She thinks that’s pretty fantastic, too.

Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.