I was poking around the Vintage Sewing Patterns Wiki today and ran across some truly puzzling costume bedfellows -- or, more accurately, pattern envelope-fellows. Take, for Exhibit A, McCall's 1890 from 1954:
I can sort of get my head around it: Dad dresses Chinese for Halloween, then gets gussied up as Santa for Christmas. Or maybe he's Santa for Christmas, and this is an exotic and adventurous family that thrills the block with sweet-and-sour pork for Chinese New Year's.
But then there's Butterick 6343, which, as far as I can tell, contains costumes with no logical connections to one another:
A geisha, a sheik and their little witch offspring? This, I think, was for the 1950s family that just wanted to be confusing.