A Twelve-Foot Gentleman Caller Has Moved Into the Neighborhood, and He Brought His Price Tag

Satire, based on: AP News: The giant skeleton has become an American Halloween fixture

Here is the news, plain as a biscuit. The Associated Press reports that “Skelly,” a 12-foot, 90-pound plastic skeleton with glowing LCD eyeballs, sold by Home Depot for $299, has become a regular fixture of the American Halloween. He first showed up in 2020, that sorry pandemic year, and folks bought him by the truckload. Newer models, I am told, can even play recorded sound over Bluetooth. The AP put it kindly: when Americans get sad, stressed or bored, we shop.

Well. From my porch I see all, and I have seen him.

I’m not one to talk, but there is a gentleman caller standing in front of half the fine houses in the county, and not one of them has introduced him properly. He is twelve feet tall, thin as a church budget, and he does not blink. My second husband, God rest him, stood five foot eight and cost a good deal less than three hundred dollars to keep, though he ate more.

Now mind you, I have no quarrel with a family that props up a skeleton for the young’uns. A child ought to have a fright on Halloween, and a pillowcase full of candy to recover with. My quarrel is with the big retail outfits that looked at a frightened country in 2020 and said, “What these people need is a ninety-pound bone man with television eyes.” Bless their heart, and I mean it the other way.

They have turned October into a social season, and I know a social season when I see one. Used to be the finest house on the road was the one with a pie on the windowsill. Now the finest house is the one with the tallest skeleton, and the second finest bought two. I heard tell that some folks dress theirs up for Christmas and leave him out till spring, like a houseguest who has discovered where you keep the good preserves. Mind you, I only heard it at church.

And now he talks. Bluetooth, they call it. I asked the Absher boy what that meant and he said the skeleton can say whatever you tell him to. Child, I have had two husbands. I do not need a third man in the yard who only repeats what he’s told. I’d have paid extra for that once, but not anymore.

Here is the etiquette lesson for the corporations, since nobody else will give it. When a company sells a bone-thin giant to a worried nation and calls it cheer, that is not hospitality. That is a man selling umbrellas in a flood and asking you to admire his manners. The skeleton is not the fool here, he is only plastic. The fool is whoever decided our grief ought to come with a receipt.

So I say let the children have their spooks and the neighbors have their fun. Just don’t let the big stores tell you that a twelve-foot stranger is what makes a home. A lit porch light and a bowl of candy have done that job for a hundred years, and neither one needed a Bluetooth.

Pass the tea. And somebody tell that skeleton to stop staring at my rosebushes.

Mrs. Mabel Mudsill, Society Editor — From the Porch