Purim costumes are a lot of fun. We should wear them all the time, right?

Wait, why don’t we wear them all the time?

Well, I guess we’d get lots of sideways glances, especially at the DMV. And airports. And anywhere we have to show ID.

There are also other reasons:

They fall apart over the course of the day.

For example, one year, my daughter dressed up as a banana (complete with a hat that represented the top of the banana, the point of which kept flopping over so it looked like a combination banana hat/shluff Koppel). But the hat kept falling off, so by the end of the day she was just the bottom half of a banana, which was turning brown. My oldest son was a clown, and he ended the day with face paint all over his clothes, including his comically-oversized tie, which we then had to wash, and we shrunk it. So now it’s just a regular tie, except that it’s orange. Another son, Heshy, was dressed as a video-game character and had a moustache made of black magic marker (80 percent of the moustaches you see on a regular basis are really just black magic marker), but he spent the whole day picking at his nose, and by the time we got to my parents’ house for the seudah, he had a beard. Meanwhile, both he and my third son had costumes that were one-piece flimsy jumpsuits with a zipper in the back that they couldn’t get out of for pit stops. And they were drinking all day because every one of their friends put a can of soda in their mishloach manot.

Many costumes are inaccurate.

People love dressing up like historical figures such as Mordechai HaTzaddik, which sounds like a good idea until they realize that they have no idea what he actually looked like. Sure, all the coloring books feel that he wore a shtreimel, but what kind of animal do you make a shtreimel out of if you live in Persia? Lizards? How do we communicate with people that we’re dressed as Mordechai and not just another rabbi that for some reason is wearing an iguana shtreimel?

That was a huge question that I had growing up. But nowadays, according to an ad I saw, you can actually buy a bright red Mordechai HaTzaddik costume, and also a Dovid HaMelech costume, and the two are totally identical except that their names are written on their respective capes. (Also, there are capes.) They did that on purpose, so no one would mix them up, even though they lived hundreds of years apart. Even though if there’s one thing we know about Mordechai’s costume, it’s that Haman’s daughter couldn’t tell it was him, which would be really strange if it said “Mordechai HaTzaddik” on his costume in huge letters.

There are also imahot costumes nowadays—you can be two of the four imahot. There’s no Sarah or Leah, but you can dress up as Rivka, for example. The way people know you’re Rivka is that it says “Rivka Imeinu” on your shirt, even though the only way Rivka would ever own a shirt that said “Imeinu” on it is if Yaakov and Eisav went in together to buy it for her. The outfit also has pictures of camels on it, which I suppose is okay, even though there’s really only one story in the Torah in which she interacted with camels, and I doubt she was so obsessed with them that her children would have them embroidered on her dress. I also saw a Goldilocks costume with the three bears embroidered on it by someone who clearly didn’t understand the Goldilocks story.

There’s also a costume of Rochel Imeinu, which of course says “Rochel Imeinu” on it, even though she didn’t actually have a second child until the day she was niftar. And to rub that in, it has a picture of Kever Rochel. I can’t say that I know what Rochel Imeinu wore in her day-to-day life, but I’m about 90 percent sure it wasn’t a shirt with a picture of the place she was going to be buried someday.

Many costumes are offensive. Nowadays, you can’t wear anything that is racially offensive. Even if you don’t mean to offend.

Sometimes people will put on a huge hat and a poncho and say that they’re Mexican. I’ve seen many Mexicans in my life, and not one of them has worn a poncho.

The new rule is that you can’t wear offensive ethnic costumes, but you can offend a specific person. You can’t dress up as an Arab terrorist; you have to dress up as a specific Arab terrorist. You have to do research.

There are certain costumes you can’t even find at all

Costumes I’ve never seen: Chosson, gabbai, candy man, charvonah, Eisav, Kohein hedyot.

But if you think about it, we all wear costumes every day. Some day in the future, some kid will run around on Purim wearing exactly what you’re wearing today and go, “Look! I’m an accountant from the olden days!”

And then someone will get offended.

By Mordechai Schmutter

Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for “Hamodia” and other magazines. He also has six books out and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].