I received the below mentioned product at no cost in order to complete an honest review.  No other compensation has been received.  Any opinions expressed are my own.

My oldest son is in middle school. They have middle school dances usually around certain holidays.  They’ll have a Halloween dance coming up soon.  He told me they were allowed to wear costumes.  He grows so fast none of the costumes we had would fit him. BuyCostumes.com is one of my go-to costume sites for affordable costumes and a good selection.

While browsing the costumes I fully expected he’d go toward his usually military or ninja costume. We had to shop in the adult men’s costumes section …he’s getting too tall!  I was pleasantly surprised when he actually chose a viking costume.  When it came he couldn’t wait to put it on. It fit him perfectly.

The costume comes with the suit, which is one piece and velcros in the back.  The brown armor is attached to the costume.  The gold ties you see are not attached to the costume they are separate.  We tried tying them the way they are in the picture.  The arms ones didn’t work out too bad but the leg ones slid down almost as soon my son started moving. We couldn’t seem to keep them in place.  The other issue I noted is that, being that the costume is one piece, when you tie up the arms you’d have to tie and untie them every time you’d want to take off or take down the costumes (say for bathroom purposes) otherwise you wouldn’t be able to just slip your arms out of the sleeve.  I think it would have been better if the gold ribbon had just been an embellishment on the costume.

The costume comes with a hat which is pretty good.  The horns stick up but are a bit floppy.  It does not come with the boot covers, weapon, or beard.  You’d need to get those separately.  Even with that my son loved his costumes.

I felt the costume still needed something so we ended up getting him a costume beard to wear with his costume.  My son is very excited to wear this costume to his school dance.  I’m thinking we’ll just leave the gold ties behind for less frustration for him. He said to me “Mom,  bet I’ll have one of the best costumes there”  So as long as he’s happy with it, then I’m happy with it.  The details of the armor and the different fabrics used for texture were pretty neat.  It did give it a more dynamic look.

This costume was in the historical section of the men’s costumes but it has a message on the site now that says it was discontinued or out of stock.  It was called the Vicious Viking costume.  Buycostumes.com has lots of costumes to choose from. They even have sections to make it easier on your budget for $10 and under, $25 and under, etc.

**I received a kit from JOLLY TIME to help facilitate this review.  No other compensation has been received*

Halloween is next week if you can believe it.  The kids have their costumes and they’re getting excited for trick or treat.  My son just went to his first middle school dance ( 🙁 I can’t believe it!) It was a Halloween dance.  I thought it would be fun to make some Halloween treats with them especially since October is National Popcorn Month.  JOLLY TIME has lots of recipes on their site for fun Halloween treats you can make yourself including popcorn balls.  I’ve personally never tried to make popcorn balls but the recipes sounded pretty easy.  I received some items from JOLLY TIME to make it easy for me to give one of their popcorn ball recipes a go.

I decided to try the Ghoulishly Fun Popcorn Balls recipe on the JOLLY TIME site.  It sounded easy and I had all the ingredients handy.  It called for regular marshmallows but I happened to have a bag of Pumpkin Spice Marshmallows handy and decided to try them.  Having never made popcorn balls before I assumed things would get sticky, and they did.  I wasn’t really sure the technique to use to mix the melted marshmallow and butter mixture in the bowl but I did the best I could.

One thing I was glad I had was the JOLLY TIME popcorn baller.  You just scoop the popcorn into the bigger side then put the other half on top and squish it together.

For me it was a learning curve.  I was afraid to put in too much thinking it wouldn’t form right but I actually didn’t put enough in and initially had some sad looking popcorn balls.  But lesson learned and I added more and ended up with some nice round popcorn balls.

Now the recipes says you can use icing to decorate them or add food coloring if you are using regular marshmallows if you like.  I didn’t since I used flavored marshmallows. The kids tried them.  It was the moment of truth.  Both of my oldest boys said they were really good.  They must have been because my 9 yr old ate 2 of them.  Use National Popcorn month as your excuse to try a fun and tasty popcorn recipes from JOLLYTIME.com

Also I used the JOLLY TIME Butter Light with Smart Balance so the popcorn was a little healthier than regular popcorn.

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