Drinking my first cup of tea on a recent Sunday morning, I glanced at the thermometer and noticed something I hadn’t seen in what seemed like forever. The temperature had finally dipped below 70 degrees. After the brutal summer heat we all experienced this year, it felt almost like a small miracle. My beloved brick colonial has never been particularly good at letting go of whatever temperature is prevailing outside. When it’s hot, it holds on to the heat. When it’s cold, well, you get the idea. But that Sunday morning, the cooler air felt like an invitation. Fall was on its way.

October is a particularly big month in my house. My husband proudly celebrates years of sobriety. Our wedding anniversary, his birthday and my birthday give us even more reasons to get excited. But there is another October tradition we eagerly look forward to every year: Halloween.

We love Halloween. We love the decorations and the movies and the ridiculous amount of candy that somehow finds its way into the house. We love the way the world seems to give itself permission to be a little strange for a few weeks. But most of all, I think, we love the costumes. There is something wonderfully fun about deciding, even for one night, that you are going to be somebody — or something — completely different.

For years, one of our favorite October outings was a trip to the old Collegeville Costume Company building. Members of the Cornish family continued to open it for Halloween sales until 2018.

There was something wonderfully odd about shopping for anything and everything Halloween inside the very building where countless costumes had once been made. It wasn’t a temporary Halloween store occupying an empty storefront for a few weeks. No, this was the place where the sewing machines had once run. Where fabric had been cut and stitched. And where boxes of costumes had been packed and sent off to stores far beyond Collegeville. For two people who love Halloween, it was hard not to be a little fascinated by it.

And those costumes were very much products of their time. If you grew up in the middle of the last century, you probably remember the basic formula: a thin printed smock, a plastic mask and a little elastic band that was supposed to hold the mask against your face. The masks were stiff, the eye holes didn’t always seem to correspond with actual human anatomy, and breathing was apparently considered an optional feature. Yet somehow, none of that mattered. To a kid standing in a store looking at those boxes, the important thing was that you weren’t just buying a piece of plastic and a flimsy piece of fabric. You were buying the chance to become Batman, a cowboy, a monster or a favorite television character for one glorious night.

What I didn’t realize when I first started thinking about the company was just how important Collegeville had been to the way Americans came to celebrate Halloween.

Before companies like Collegeville and its longtime competitor New York-based Ben Cooper began mass-producing costumes, dressing up was largely a homemade affair. Children made do with old clothes, sheets, makeup and whatever a parent or grandparent could create with a sewing machine and a little imagination. There was no reason to buy a costume when you could turn an old sheet into a ghost or your father’s suit into something vaguely resembling a grown-up. Collegeville helped change that by putting an inexpensive, ready-made costume into a box that could be picked up in a store and taken home.

The company itself had a rather unlikely beginning. Samuel D. Cornish was a dentist who had worked as a draftsman for the Phoenixville Iron Company before opening his practice in Collegeville. In 1909 — or possibly 1910, depending on the source — he started what would become the Collegeville Flag and Manufacturing Company. Flags were the original business, along with aprons and other textile goods. It was apparently the abundance of leftover fabric from making those flags that eventually led the company in an entirely different direction.

There are a few versions of how Collegeville got into the costume business, and I suspect the truth may be hiding somewhere in between them. One story says an employee saw possibilities in the red, white and blue scraps left over from making flags and realized they could become Uncle Sam costumes. Another involves a customer looking for a clown costume. However it happened, someone at Collegeville recognized a market for inexpensive costumes, and by the 1920s they had become an important part of the business.

That may sound like a small business decision, but it happened at a time when Halloween itself was changing. As the holiday became increasingly popular, there was money to be made in helping people celebrate it. Collegeville was there early, producing the outfits that helped move Halloween from the sewing room and the family attic onto store shelves.

And then America got television.

Children who had once dressed as witches, ghosts and cowboys could now see their favorite characters in their living rooms every night. Movies and comic books created new heroes and villains, while television turned familiar faces into national obsessions. Costume manufacturers quickly figured out that a child who wanted to be a generic cowboy was one thing, but a child who desperately wanted to be the Lone Ranger was a customer with a very specific request.

Collegeville began licensing recognizable characters, and its catalogs became an unexpectedly wonderful record of what American children were watching, reading and talking about. Casper the Friendly Ghost, Woody Woodpecker and the Lone Ranger appeared alongside more traditional costumes. Over the years characters from Peanuts, Star Trek, E.T., Jaws, Transformers and a long list of other television shows, movies, comic characters and cultural crazes joined the list of offerings.

This is one of the things many love about looking through old Collegeville catalogs — that is, if you are able to get your hands on one. They aren’t simply lists of costumes. They are little snapshots of American childhood, and you can watch popular culture change as you turn the pages. The things children wanted to be in the 1950s weren’t necessarily the things they wanted to be in the 1970s, and by the 1980s and 1990s the costumes reflected an entirely different world of movies, television, toys and licensed characters.

The company wasn’t operating on some tiny regional scale, either. By the 1970s and 1980s, Collegeville costumes were being sold throughout the country. In 1988, the company reportedly sold roughly three million costumes, helped by the enormous popularity of the California Raisins.

Three million costumes! It still seems a little incredible when you think about where they were coming from.

Collegeville, Pennsylvania.

And that’s what makes the story particularly fun for me. For years, my husband and I walked into that old building every October simply because we loved Halloween. Poking around and looking at costumes, we were standing in a building that had once been part of a national industry without really appreciating just how big that industry had become.

And then, eventually, the world that had made Collegeville successful began to change again. The little plastic mask and printed smock that had once seemed like the perfect Halloween costume began to look cheap and old-fashioned. Parents became more concerned about masks that obstructed children’s vision, while Halloween itself was becoming increasingly popular with adults. Costumes became more elaborate, parties became a bigger part of the holiday and people began looking for something a little more distinctive than the same character costume hanging on every store rack. Big-box retailers changed the way people shopped, licensing became more complicated and, eventually, the internet changed just about everything.

Collegeville held on longer than Ben Cooper, but by the 1990s the family business was nearing the end. The company continued to produce popular costumes. Barney became its biggest-selling costume in 1992. But it also made some licensing bets that didn’t work out quite so well. Waterworld, for example, turned out to be considerably less valuable as a costume license than anyone might have hoped.

By the middle of the 1990s, Collegeville was gone as an independent costume manufacturer. Rubies eventually acquired both Collegeville and its old rival Ben Cooper. But the building remained. And for years, so did that little bit of Halloween magic.

Every October, the doors would open again, and people could walk into the old factory and look around. My husband and I were among them, happy to wander through a place that had become part factory, part local landmark and part Halloween tradition.

There is something pretty wonderful about that.

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Looking for something spooky this Halloween? Spring Mountain Adventures recreates itself as Scream Mountain Haunted Adventures on weekends. At 757 Spring Mount Road in Schwenksville, you’ll find a haunted hayride, a haunted lift and walk, and a kid-friendly starter haunted hayride. There’s also live music, yummy food (try the funnel fries!) and drinks around the fire pit.

A tradition in Schwenksville since 1956, Schwenksville’s Annual Halloween Parade returns Thursday, October 29, which just happens to be my birthday. The parade steps off at 2nd Street and Perkiomen Avenue and ends at 415 Main Street.

The family-friendly parade awards cash prizes for the scariest, most original, best character and best group costumes. Festivities begin at 7 p.m.