DANVILLE, Ill. – Deciding what to be for Halloween has been easy for children who have known Danville’s Cherri Drews during the last seven or eight years. All they had to do was visit with the queen of costumes in her North Gilbert Street home.

“I always loved Halloween as a kid,” Drews said. “Celebrating it is a family tradition. We decorate the house inside and outside.”

A line of varying sizes of plastic pumpkins that light up stretches down the driveway of the family’s house. Those in the market for a costume can follow that pumpkin line to a special part of Drews’ home that holds racks of costumes and tables of accessories.

Drews isn’t in the costume business, although she has retail experience from her job years ago at The Fly in the Village Mall. She’s not a seamstress, although she made a few Halloween costumes for her children before she began this venture.

Drews discovered that after Halloween, even expensive costumes sold for just a few dollars. She began buying them up, first for her own children, then for other kids she knew and finally for a very specific kind of garage sale.

“We’d go shopping the day after Halloween,” Blair Drews, her 15-year old daughter, said. “I loved helping pick things out.

“My favorite costumes were the ones my brother and I wore; one year we were Pebbles and Bam Bam,” she said.

Now, Blair and her brother Brock are active Schlarman High School students with full schedules. Except for homecoming week, there isn’t much opportunity for dressing as the Flintstones. Actually, the costumes of choice for the siblings this year were the Rugrats.

“They enjoyed having all this here to play with when they were younger and to choose from at Halloween,” their mom said, “but now they don’t have the interest, and we don’t have the time with all their activities.”

Last weekend was to be the last time the family held its annual Halloween costume sale. Drews planned to sell out to the walls.

The selection included costumes in sizes from newborn (a jack-o-lantern) to one-size-fits-all (a much larger jack-o-lantern). Other styles were available in those sizes and others in between.

Plush pink unicorns with shiny horns hung beside pirates, zombies and hippies. Drews’ collection included multiples of some styles in case people want to dress alike.

There were inflatable motorcycle, race car and jeep costumes that fit over a child’s torso so he or she appears to be driving. There was even an inflatable helmet included.

A variety of rubber masks, some scary and some funny, as well as props, wigs and make-up filled the tables along one side of the room. But the prices were the best part of the selection; they ranged from $2 to $10, with accessories priced as low as 50 cents.

“This weekend is it,” Drews said last week, with a note of sadness in her voice. “I don’t know what I’m going to do the weekend after Halloween this year.”