I’m not saying it should cost an arm and a leg to make your home festive for Halloween. All I’m saying is that skeleton decorations should be real arms and legs.
10 years ago, I didn’t have this problem. People would come to my house and see my jackalope and my toucan skull and my coyote jaws and be like, “huh, cool, I didn’t realize that’s what that looked like.” Now, my brother’s girlfriend comes over and asks me if l got my wet specimens from Michael’s—because that’s where she got hers.
No, Madison, I got this jar of tattooed human fingers from a traveling expo at the convention center, thank you very much. And I paid $300 for the privilege.
It seems like everywhere you look now there’s a giant skeleton or mummified hand—depicted with increasingly realistic likeness, trust me, mass-produced for sale where just anyone can purchase it. For instance, all it takes is a few pounds of plastic and a 3-D printer to recreate Julia, the 6’2″ skeleton I purchased to match the one exhumed from H.H. Holmes’s estate.
6’2″ Julia used to be the tallest skeleton anyone had ever seen. Now, 15-footers spelling out H-O-T-T-O-G-O can be found throughout this country’s most regular-ass neighborhoods.
And that’s the other thing: having bones is weird, okay? Or it should be. If you have a bat skeleton in your house, it should have once been a bat. Why? Because that’s weird.
Taking all of the morbidity out of skeleton ownership is what makes it palatable for normies, and—worst of all—makes my house seem like a comfortable, non-creepy place for people to hang out all October. It doesn’t even occur to them that this box of squirrel femurs in my kitchen is here all the time.
So until craft stores sell squirrel femurs instead of a $4.99 box of “spooky toothpicks,” I want no part in the mass production of fake bones.