As holiday decorations go up, meet Minneapolis’ Halloween holdouts

A giant skeleton torso on a south Minneapolis lawn didn’t disappear after Halloween. Instead, it got a huge red scarf.

On a rooftop in Minneapolis’ Uptown area, another giant skeleton stands tall, flames glowing in its eyes.

“It’s not the easiest place to get (it) down,” said homeowner Jeffrey Reardon, 41. “I think it’s funny. I might dress it up.”

The year-end holidays are in full swing, with Halloween behind us and Thanksgiving piling on to winter holidays. When should our Halloween decorations be officially swapped out for winter holiday decor?

“I’m one for taking Halloween decorations down because it’s done, but you know what?” said St. Paul-based Juliet Mitchell, CEO of the Life Etiquette Institute. “It’s a personal choice, and sometimes people [leave them up] to be kind of edgy.”

Mitchell recommends that people take Halloween decorations down by Nov. 14. Winter holiday decorations usually go up after Thanksgiving, and should be removed by Jan. 31. But many people leave them up because they don’t have time to take them down. Weather is also a factor. Sometimes people aren’t physically up to the task.

It’s also a matter of neighborhood vibe and personal choice.

“Halloween is only one night but it doesn’t linger,” she said. “But there’s no reason it shouldn’t linger.”

This year she learned more about Day of the Dead, and that made Halloween feel “a little bit more like a multi-day holiday focused on thinking about ancestors and the fact that death is part of life, and bringing that in,” she said.

On Wednesday, she and her three kids will cut their Christmas tree at Krueger’s Christmas Tree Farm in Lake Elmo. After that, the Halloween decorations will come down.

“For a lot of people, Halloween is their holiday and they look forward to it every year, and they want to keep those decorations up as long as possible,” said Nicki Black, a Plymouth-based certified etiquette consultant and founder of Polished and Beyond.

Uptown Minneapolis resident Sarah Knispel, 32, has a huge pumpkin on the porch and a Halloween garland around the front door. Inside she has pumpkin, bat and spider garlands, spider lights and fake spiders.

On the back porch, she has a hanging jack-o’-lantern that she forgot to take down.

She doesn’t believe in putting up Christmas decorations before Black Friday.

“I feel like I’ve been attacked with Christmas shopping ads since Oct. 1 so in my own way it feels like I am not succumbing if I leave decorations up,” she said. “I’m a rebel and my cause is anti-consumerism.”

Reardon might dress up his skeleton as Jack Skellington from “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”

Depending on how bad the weather gets, he may keep the skeleton up through winter and just make seasonal changes to its outfit.

Not everyone wants Halloween to stick around.

Miranda Soukup, creator of the viral Taylor Swift “Life of a Showghoul” Halloween house near Minneapolis’ Lake Hiawatha, took her decorations down on Nov. 1. But she forgot one thing.

“There were three skeleton cats on my balcony that have managed to escape the front yard clean-up,” she said.

As of Nov. 21, the kitties were still on the house because they were zip-tied to the gutter, and Soukup wanted to limit using the ladder. Her goal was to remove the cats before the Christmas garland. The warm weather last weekend inspired her to take them down.

She puts her Christmas decor up right after Thanksgiving, but left her pumpkins out for the squirrels.

The costume came off the next day. The pencil and trees in the couple’s yard are wrapped in Christmas lights, but those won’t turn on until the day after Thanksgiving.