Last year a lot of people didn’t want to take down those 12 foot high giant skeletons, so they left them up all year, even though they look extra-creepy when they’re not Halloween decorations.
But this year I’ve noticed at least three cases of people decorating those giant skeletons for Christmas, as a sort of “Nightmare Before Christmas” thing, with Santa hats and with strings of colored lights wrapped around the bones.
My wife and I have talked about getting one but storage during the off season is an issue. She suggested we leave it out year round and decorate it according to the season. It can be a Valentine’s Day skeleton, a St. Patrick’s Day skeleton, a 4th of July skeleton, etc., etc. It’s a tempting idea.
That’s an interesting article, and explains something I just learned about this weekend. Bram Stoker’s short horror story The Squaw first appeared in the Christmas magazine Holly Leaves; The Christmas Number of the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News in 1893. I thouight it was pretty inappropriate material for a Christmas story. (I could allow Doyle to get away with publishing the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, in a Beeton’s Christmas Annual because it was a detective story more than a murder story. But Stoker’s piece is a gory horror story.)
There is a “skeleton for all seasons” just down the street from me. It started off in just the bare bones(haha) configuration. He(?) has morphed over the last two months, first with a Santa mask and giant turkey drumstick and now Mr. Giant Bones is sporting a nice outfit.
I’m curious to see if he sticks around for Valentines day…with maybe a heart in the chest cavity and holding a box of chocolates.
One yard I pass by on my commute goes all-out with the Halloween decorations every year, and converted the whole thing into a Christmas display by the simple expedient of adding a twelve-foot-tall Jack Skellington to all of the other twelve-foot-tall skeletons. When I passed by there today, though, everything was taken down except for a single unremarkable life-size Santa (which I don’t think was even up there, before Christmas).
Another yard which goes big on the Halloween decorations (usually something different every year) also goes big on completely different Christmas decorations: Usually a couple of those white plywood cutout deer, but about 20’ tall. Though, since they do something different for Halloween every year, they probably don’t worry too much about storage. My favorite was one year, they had a roller coaster rail coming off of their roof, with a car crashed at the bottom where the rails ended, full of skeletons.
A house near where I work goes HUGE on both Halloween and Christmas decorations – they’ve designed them so they can be used for both holidays! There are boards with LED lights that are bats and suchlike for Halloween and the next month change into candy canes. There are boxes that are orange and purple for Halloween but become red and green lights for Christmas. And they have a set of figures from Nightmare Before Christmas that don’t change in any way between the holidays – they fit both.
