No bones about it, Skelly is having a moment

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This article was published 31/10/2022 (1425 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you’ve heard the name Skelly — or are lucky enough to have one to call your own — then you know that a certain oversized Halloween decoration is having A Moment.

Home Depot’s 12-foot skeleton, Skelly — a much catchier moniker than “12 ft Giant-Sized Skeleton with LifeEyes(TM) LCD Eyes” — made its debut in 2020, and became an instant sensation. An improbably, unnecessarily tall sensation. For two years now, the skeleton, which retails for US $299 (C$448), has sold out, with people clamouring to get what is, again, a 12-foot skeleton. People anxiously awaited pre-sales. They lined up outside Home Depots in the wee hours of the morning.

Those able to snag one — and then, uh, get it home — have been having a lot of fun with it. People give their skeletons names, or dress them up. Some people leave them up all year long. Skelly has gone viral on TikTok. It has also inspired many imitators from other big-box retailers.

Skeletons, of course, are deeply embedded in the iconography of Halloween, owing to their long association with the terrifying and the macabre (see: Yorick’s skull in Hamlet; Vincent Van Gogh’s Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette). We all have — are? — one, which is a cool thing to think about just before falling asleep.

Counterpoint: skeletons can also be funny. If you think about it, they are just these gangly, big-eyed buddies that are always smiling. Don’t believe me? Put a skeleton in a top hat. Or have it play another skeleton’s ribs like a marimba à la Disney’s 1929 Silly Symphony short, The Skeleton Dance. Or, in this case, blow it up to ridiculous proportions.

It’s in that spirit that Skelly exists. Sure, one can arrange this particular bag of bones in a scary way — I mean, it really does loom — but people are readily embracing the outsized skeleton’s silly side.

Winnipegger Alysa Friesen got in on the 12-foot skeleton craze this year, ordering hers from Home Depot in September.

“(My husband and I) had been looking at it online for a while, joking with each other like, ‘Wouldn’t it be so fun to get that?’” she tells me. The height, obviously, was the selling point. “It’s one decoration that would put us on the map for Halloween decorations.”

Friesen’s giant skeleton is named Audrey, as selected by her eight-year-old daughter, “because she thought it was a beautiful name.”

The popularity of Skelly, or Audrey, isn’t difficult to pin down.

“They’re so much fun — just big and awesome,” Friesen says. “It’s cool because there are several groups on Facebook for people with 12-foot skeletons from all around. It’s fun to see how other people decorate with them.”

Audrey weighs in at about 60 pounds —“but feels heavier than that,” Friesen says — and will RIP for the other 11 months of the year in a nine-foot Christmas-tree bag, which is the biggest bag Friesen could find. “So, hopefully it fits.”

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @JenZoratti