Days after graduating from college, I moved from my suburban New Jersey hometown to a cramped walk-up in Manhattan’s East Village, where I shared a bathroom with three roommates. I traded preppy blonde highlights for a black pixie cut, swapped J. Crew for American Apparel (it was the 2000s, mind you), and spent my Saturday nights at Lit Lounge or Angels & Kings. I told myself that this was me and I’d never live outside a city again.
Now, on the cusp of 40, I’m not just living in the suburbs, I’m living in the same town I ran away from so eagerly two decades ago. And there’s one thing above all that’s helped me make peace with it: Home Depot’s 12-foot-tall skeleton lawn ornament.
For those who may be unfamiliar with “Skelly,” Home Depot began selling it in the fall of 2020, with COVID still rampant and vaccines distant on the horizon. Per an oral history in VICE, Skelly had been in the works since 2019, but the fact that it debuted amid peak pandemic upheaval made this stand-out piece of Halloween decor seem more significant. According to The Washington Post that year, “Skelly” became no less than “an Internet meme, a status marker, a coping mechanism, a memento mori. A reminder that whimsical indulgences are still permitted, and still funny, no matter how morbid American life has become.”
(It was also an actual sales success, not just a meme. Home Depot had its “most successful Halloween event” in the company’s history.)
To quote a few tweets:
“The 12-foot Home Depot skeleton is the only thing that could make me wish I had a lawn.”
“My favorite thing about women is the mutual understanding we all have about the 12 ft skeleton from Home Depot being hot.”
“This skeleton is the only thing that has cured my depression.”
I’d like to talk about how this skeleton changed my outlook on life.
In the fall of 2021, I moved back to my hometown in New Jersey. I’d spent 15 years living primarily in New York City, with shorter stints in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and nearly a year as a COVID-era “digital nomad.” I was planning to be there for just a few months before moving to the West Coast for good. And it would definitely not be more than a few months; I was just going to spend some time with my family and get my stuff out of storage. Unfortunately, I was so bored after moving back home that I did a terrible thing: I downloaded Hinge. Within a few months I was in a committed relationship with a man who had a house, a well-manicured lawn, and a dog named Becky. I must have really liked him, because our relationship got me to stay even though I very much did not want to live in a place like that.
You see, like most avowed city dwellers who actively disdain the idea of houses with lawns, I proudly hated the suburbs because I’d lived in them. And I’d been miserable. To me, the suburbs were all the status anxiety of New York with none of the sophistication or diversity, or weirdness. I had grown up listening to ‘90s pop-punk bands that railed against cookie-cutter conformity and obsessive lawncare. As an adult, I imagined that the girls who’d tormented me in high school and then stuck around in the suburbs had grown up into Christian Girl Autumn twentysomethings and then wine-mom PTA blondes who reveled in your shortcomings — which, of course, they knew, thanks to neighborhood gossip.
You see, “Skelly” isn’t just a novelty, it’s a subversive culture-jamming phenomenon.
I needed something to make me feel like I could still be weird in the suburbs. And that’s when I decided that I absolutely needed a 12-foot-tall skeleton.
You see, “Skelly” isn’t just a novelty, it’s a subversive culture-jamming phenomenon. You can really only grasp this if you join the ostensibly private Facebook group called “12 Ft Skeleton Halloween Club,” which is now up to over 57,000 members, many of whom leave their big skeletons up year-round. And this is not out of laziness. It’s because they’re intentionally trying to fuck with suburbia.
The Facebook group is chock full of photos of angry letters from neighbors who claim the skeletons are “satanic,” takedown notices from homeowners’ associations, and creative attempts to comply with local regulations that any lawn decorations be “seasonal.” The 12-foot-tall skeleton turns into a Santa Claus skeleton for Christmas and a Cupid skeleton for Valentine’s Day. It wears a football jersey for the Super Bowl and a cap and gown around graduation time. Some costumes are truly unique — the best one I’d ever seen posted in the Facebook group was a skeleton in a toga holding an enormous knife, for the Ides of March. These are people fighting the good fight, in my opinion.
We ordered “The Big Leboneski” at 6 a.m. on July 31st, the timing of a “code orange:” In Halloween decor enthusiast circles, that’s the term for when the notoriously scarce giant skeletons go on sale on Home Depot’s website. By late September, he was up on the front lawn. Within days, if we were sitting out on the front porch, instead of silently walking by, the neighbors would stop and remark — rather positively! — on the skeleton. On Halloween, being “that house” brought us more trick-or-treaters. A year later, when the end of September rolled around, we had text messages asking why The Big Leboneski wasn’t back up yet. (He unfortunately got some broken bones in a storm a few weeks after Halloween and needs repairs.)
As it turns out, the neighbors hadn’t been the judgmental ones — I was. I put up the skeleton as a middle finger to suburbia, but it ultimately helped me realize I wasn’t living in a boring place, full of boring people. As we grow older, we (mostly) drop the need to signal “I’m different” with purple hair dye or edgy fashion, but that doesn’t mean we’ve gotten completely dull — and putting up strange Halloween decorations in the lawn is a great way to spark conversation. It turns out that a lot of suburbanites are pretty weird, and they’re happy to show off those lovable quirks when they’re talking to the person who has a 12-foot-tall skeleton in her front yard. Some of my neighbors were even fellow ex-New Yorkers who admitted the period of adjustment to a small, quiet town felt like a years-long grief process. I watched them breathe sighs of relief when they admitted how much they still missed the city. Clearly, it wasn’t something they talked about often.
I wonder how many of them had thought they were the odd ones out.