I have a very low-stakes problem, but it’s still an absolute problem: I can’t stop my kids from decorating our lawn for Halloween in a skeleton pose that looks like a dirty joke. I just don’t know how to tell her to knock it off without explaining it in a way that makes it look like she’s masturbating.
It all started when she started begging for outdoor Halloween decorations. Our town loves Halloween and she has a big case of FOMO. She complained that “everyone” and “all her friends” had outdoor decorations, but we didn’t. So I told her we could buy a skeleton—not a giant one, either—and the price had to be reasonable.
So she and my husband went shopping and came home with a life-size skeleton with glowing red eyes. They also bought him a pair of sunglasses and superglued them on so that in the dark he looked like the Terminator. But he’s relaxing in a plastic Adirondack chair, so he also has a bit of parrot-head energy.
This turned into a fun project for my daughter, who also took over the rest of the Halloween decorations, hauling out the plastic bins and handing out lights and sticky bats around the house. She gave the skeleton a ceramic jack-o-lantern that she found in our collection of ornaments. She was obviously having the time of her life decorating to her exact vision, so I let her go crazy. In true firstborn/only child Type A fashion, she loves nothing more than making plans and executing them to her exact specifications, which is a good quality of life that I generally encourage. The problem arose when we added a small grocery store pumpkin to the mix—a pumpkin with a curved four-inch stem—she decided the skeleton needed pumpkin. You know how this works.
One afternoon I came home from errands to find the pumpkin lying between the skeleton’s legs, his bony hand resting gently on it. You know, like the old days where you might sit and pose at JCPenny Portraits with a decorative gourd. The problem is, when you place a pumpkin with a stem gently on the skeleton’s crotch and place a hand on top, it looks like the skeleton is pleasuring itself. (She’s definitely too young to be a deliberate prank.) And there’s no way to position the stem so that it No Looks obscene.
I laughed, cringed, moved the pumpkin closer to the skeleton, and thought nothing of it again…until a recent playdate. My kid wanted to show her friends our skeleton on their way out. But she was very distressed! Someone moved the pumpkin to the wrong place. She moved it back. I didn’t say anything, hoping no one would notice, I just had a dirty idea and no one else on our block did.
Then, the next morning, my husband texted me: “I think the local teenagers found Mr. Skeleton.” I imagined pumpkin entrails hanging in this place. Wrong! “When I was taking out the trash this morning, his pumpkin stem had been placed in a very suggestive position.” At this point, I had to explain that this was a completely unintentional behavior on our part.
So now I have three options: 1. Keep moving the pumpkin every time she moves it back, saying nothing, enacting a wordless comedy of errors. 2. Find a way to explain to her that it’s misplaced, but don’t actually explain it, start an argument, or stifle her creativity. (She just very proud ) 3. Let neighbors think we deliberately decorate our yards with skeletons without fear of death or public indecency charges.
I honestly can’t decide what I should do here – if anything. Maybe I just assumed no one else would notice it, or waited to see if our neighbors would say anything. Maybe I’m being shameless. Maybe I’d say, if everyone thinks we’re the asshole Skeleton Family, that’s okay. At least it’s a conversation starter.
