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On most days, Oia K. is a 5-year-old girl in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn.
She goes to kindergarten, plays chess and takes swimming classes.
On Halloween, however, Oia is a space alien — at least with some help from a pair of massive pink sunglasses, two ping-pong balls attached to springs, and her favorite Walmart boots.
She said her favorite Halloween candy is “anything chocolate,” and she plans to get tons of it by winning over her neighborhood sugar dispensers — aka the Flatbush adults — in her homemade alien costume, which also includes a shiny hot pink top and leggings, a neon plastic ray-gun and a gray wig.
Why the hair?
“That’s obvious!” Oia told The Post. “It’s fun to wear a wig!”
The 5-year-old is one of dozens of New York City kids who spoke with The Post about their Halloween costumes this year, along with children from across the five boroughs, Connecticut and New Jersey.
The children were of various ages, economic backgrounds, cultural origins and candy preferences. (Who knew Sour Patch Kids could be so divisive?)
But one thing remained true about these young New Yorkers: They couldn’t give a Twix about the nation’s trendiest costumes.
Despite a Google Trends report listing Dolly Parton as the number one kids’ Halloween getup of 2026, The Post saw zero kids dressed up as the legendary “Jolene” crooner — or any of the other “top” disguises, including Hannah Montana, Pokémon’s Ash Ketchum and smiley-faced soup dumplings.
Instead, New York kids like Oscar L. from Brooklyn Heights decided to wear a homemade dragon costume. “I want to be the dragon because I read a lot of dragon books,” the 10-year-old told The Post, mentioning the “Wings of Fire” series by Tui T. Sutherland as one of his favorites.
“I think it’s really cool how the dragons are drawn.”
Oscar and his younger brother Matis, 8, made their own costumes by cutting fabric into the shape of huge dragon wings, then sewing them onto the backs of their favorite hoodies so they could “fly” around their neighborhood.
Scale-print sweatpants and dragon armor cut from iridescent paper made the costume roar to life.
In Tribeca, 5-year-old Artie V. convinced his two siblings — Stella, 9, and Skyler, 3 — to dress as a pack of dinosaurs, which they helped create together with their parents.
“We like how they can be different colors and different kinds of dinosaurs,” explained Artie, “but we can still dress as a family.”
His sister Stella added that the dinosaur costumes were as warm as her winter coat — and that there was real fun to be had by swinging a Tyrannosaurus Rex‘s “big, long tail” down Franklin Street.
Even kids too young to speak had some DIY joy (with a side of Almond Joys).
When Jake Hanson and his wife moved to Astoria last month, they saved all their cardboard moving boxes to make a Halloween costume for their 2-year-old daughter Noori.
With some paint and duct tape, those boxes became the famous “Catbus” from the 1988 anime classic “My Neighbor Totoro,” with Noori riding in the center during her trick-or-treat rounds.
“We watched ‘My Neighbor Totoro’ with Noori a few months ago since it’s a nice, slow animated cartoon about a family moving to a new home,” Hanson told The Post. “She loved it so much, we bought her a book version of the movie.”
For Halloween, Noori asked to be Mei — the little girl in the animated movie — and insisted that her parents dress up as the fuzzy, adorable Totoro sprites alongside her.
Hanson said the homemade costume was worth it — even though it took “a month or two” to save enough boxes to make it happen.
New York kids with DIY costumes feel the same.
“I love my Halloween costume,” said Oia in Ditmas Park. “Because when I wear it, I feel like a star that’s bright.”

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