There are reasons not to want a child wearing a costume made of newspaper.

Fire, for one: Little Suzie gets her Sunday-edition coat-hanger Tinkerbell wings too close to a candle-lit jack-o-lantern and whoosh! She's a ball of flame streaking by as other kids shout, "AWESOME Human Torch costume!"

So for trick-or-treat safety, do NOT let your child wear a costume made of …. Wait, my editor wants something. What? … Oh, it's not? OK then.

I'm told this is not a Halloween safety column, and in fact I am supposed to encourage you to make a newspaper costume.

Why would you?

For a hundred bucks.

The Ledger-Enquirer will award $100 Visa gift cards to competitors who come up with the best costumes made out of the newspaper. Email costume photos to Sonya Sorich, ssorich@ledger-enquirer.com, by 3 p.m. Monday.

You can do a lot with newspaper, for $100. Just the other day I made a vampire cape out of it.

I meant to make a fat Elvis jumpsuit, but you need help for that, because it needs to be built onto your body, with packing tape in places you can't reach. And you can only wear it once before it has to be cut off you, if you haven't used the restroom in a while.

One thing I learned from wearing a cape made of newspapers is they're actually quite insulating. I guess that's why homeless people used to sleep under them. I dread to think how many froze to death as newspapers shrank to save printing costs.

A fat Elvis jumpsuit firmly affixed with packing tape could make you sweat like … a fat Elvis. "Wow, that looks so real!" people would say as you wiped your dripping brow with a sash and sang "Love Me Tender."

Don't think newspaper wear is white trash. As folks who still read the newspaper's hard-copy edition may recall, the Scott Paper Company came out with paper dresses as a promotion for its toilet products in 1966, and it got so wrapped up in orders it doffed the endeavor. Other manufacturers took up the slack. If you still have one of those 1960s dresses, you should get it appraised because it could be worth something.

One hundred dollars -- that's what a costume you make out of the newspaper could be worth.

You could attach already folded papers side to side in a circle around your neck and call it an Elizabethan collar. Just don't try to light a cigarette while you're wearing it.

Tim Chitwood, tchitwood@ledger-enquirer.com, 706-571-8508.