HOMEGOODS 2023
Written by Jonathan Wojcik
The first best thing about Halloween at Homegoods is its sheer volume. Homegoods stores are sometimes absolutely packed with Halloween items throughout the month of August, and continue putting a few out all the way into October. The next best thing about Halloween at Homegoods however is also the WORST thing, which is that no two Homegoods necessarily get all the same things. This means you truly never know what you can find, but it also means that with over 900 Homegoods locations in North America, we're all doomed to miss out on any number of wonderful treasures.In 2023, the two locations near me really knock it out of the park once more...
LIFE SIZE SKELETON CARRIAGE
I was sure this was nothing but a store display, I mean, it's an entire fake stagecoach with a spider web motif and a dapper skeleton driver, missing only a gigantic skeletal horse or two. Few private individuals would even have a means to transport this item, let alone the likely thousands of dollars it had to have cost, but when I came back days later...it was gone. Did somebody actually buy this thing, or did they just decide it took up too much floor space?
Skeleton Fiddler Television
This is a cute little fake television set with an adorable diorama scene behind the glass; a skeleton fiddler playing for a bunch of dogs in Halloween costumes. It's as adorable as it is oddly specific, and I believe you can also put batteries in it to light it up?!
SPOOKY CAMERA SNOWGLOBE
This object makes less sense the more you stop to consider it. It's a fake little resin model of a camera in the process of printing a "photograph" of a married skeleton couple. Sure! That's understandable! But it's also inside of a snowglobe, which is a slightly odd place for a camera to be. It shares the snowglobe with a human skull and some roses, but they're significantly smaller than said camera, and the entire snowglobe is on top of a fake book of spells. Any two of these elements make much more sense together than any three or more.
SPIDER SKULL BOOK STACK
Those fake book stack statues sure are popular, aren't they? This one is topped by a nicely realistic human skull, actually so impressive it could have been molded from the real thing if it wasn't so small, but atop this picture-perfect skull is a completely cartoony unrealistic black spider, almost beetle-like with angry red cartoon eyes. I guess that makes it another Heebie Jeebie.
ZOMBIE CANDY BOWL GREETER
This is one of those fairly large, figural candy bowls you're meant to leave on a table for your guests or even on your porch for trick-or-treaters, but this one is a lovably stylized cartoon zombie with big round eyeballs, exposed brains and crooked teeth, the entire top of its oversized head missing to expose whatever you decide to fill it with. Since there are patches of pinkish brain tissue showing, I think you're obligated to fill the head with something in equally pink packaging.
PUMPKIN MUMMY
These appear to be mummies, but their bare unbandaged scalps reveal that their heads are bright orange pumpkins, and they even have Jack O' Lantern faces on the outside of their wrappings. So they're undead mummies with pumpkins for heads, or pumpkin creatures dressing up AS mummies. The latter is more likely, since they've also got trick-or-treat pails.
I see a lot of Halloween media in which a monster joins the festivities, passing itself off as a costume, but I don't see nearly enough in which a monster has fun dressing as a different monster for Halloween.
EYEBALL ROSE STATUE
A quite large and elaborate new Peeper statue, or what I later came to think of as a "Seemore," this item features three rosebuds with human eyeballs, and a happy little green frog friend who's holding a fourth eyeball in its little froggy hand. Perhaps one of the flowers should have been missing an eye?
FELT MONSTERS
These are delightful felted monster figurines including two tall, avocado shaped goblins, one of which is a cyclops with a single large yellow eye, and a shorter purple monster with horns and a much wider, even cuter face. All three have stitchy black mouths, moomin-like ears and a really rustic, hand made charm.
GOLD SPIDER BOOKSTACK
ANOTHER stack of fake books, but this time, they're presided over by a mechanical-looking golden spider with crystal eyes! Neat! No doubt a magical automoton assigned to guard these forbidden tomes from the prying eyes of foolish, mortal intruders! Good job, little guy! Bite some fingers off!
WOODEN GHOSTS
It's the simplest possible ghost design - a wavy gumdrop shape with black spots for its eyes and mouth - but they're two-dimensional blocks of grimy looking wood. I just like them. They're $8 each, and that's easily twice what I would actually pay for them, but I like them. They're gone now, so more power to either the two people who both decided these were well worth $8, or dare I say, the single big spender who needed both of these more than they needed $16?!...no...no, it couldn't be. Nobody's THAT loaded these days.
FELTED...FRANKEN...BOTTLE?
This is another soft fuzzy felted tabletop piece, but it's shaped like a green bottle with a big label that says "POISON" on it, and that in itself is a little silly, but its "bottlecap" looks like a flat-topped black hairdo, it has grey "bolts" on the sides of its neck, and somehow, it also has a stitched "scar" on it. It's a felted bottle of poison that is also a Frankenstein's Monster.
HAUNTED TREE CANDLE HOLDER
These are big, heavy, metal candle holders molded like twisted, gnarled trees, standing on their tentacle-like roots and with hilarious, moaning ghostly faces in their trunks, kind of "Oogie Boogie" style faces. Always love to see a spooky tree monster as the actual focal character in a Halloween piece. It just doesn't happen nearly often enough!
SCANDALIZED SKELETONS
Another set of "See No Evil, etc." skeletons, but the way they're sitting side-by-side, covering their eyes, mouth and ears, just really really looks like they're overreacting to an embarrassing bit of gossip or an off-color joke one of them just blurted out. I feel like maybe that unrelated pumpkin in the lower right is the one who said it, too.
SKELETON KING
What is this, Blasphemous?! There's actually been a lot of gold and jewel-crusted skeletons every year at Homegoods lately, but this may be one of the coolest; a bust of just the head and torso, with a golden crown and very stylish golden ribcage armor. Not very practical as armor for a flesh and blood person, of course, but if you're already a skeleton, maybe you just want to reinforce your ribs and look spectacular while you're at it.
SKELETON ON A THRONE
Michael's has a "Skeleton on a Throne" available this year, but the "throne" is really a toilet. This skeleton is on an actual throne, a big gold one with purple plush cushioning. It's 20 inches tall, which is large for a decorative figure, but I like to think it's life size, making it adorably small for an actual skeleton on an actual throne. He doesn't care! He still feels important on his little tiny throne, sipping his little tiny wineglass!
THE SADDEST MUMMY :'''''''(
The Homegoods pet section had these three-packs of squeaky, vinyl dog toys with a lovable style to them; a vivid green Frankenstein's Monster with a sort of "gingerbread man" simplicity and a fanged little mouth, a happy pink sheet ghost with even pinker cheeks, and an adorably nubby, big-headed mummy with gigantic white eyes peering from the black depths of its bandaged face.
But of all the sets in the rack, only the mummy in this set had this dribble of extra rubber trailing straight down from one of the eyes, a manufacturing flaw that makes it look like a constantly crying mummy. Yeah, I bought them. I have given this mummy a home in which no canine will ever get a chance to chew him apart.
SPIDERWEB BOWL CREATURE
These are really striking, lovely spiderweb bowls with a red interior and black outside, deep enough to have a shape almost like an upturned umbrella, but if they're here, and they're this "high on the list," you know there's more to them than that:
TO BE CONTINUED?!?
Of the two Homegoods I have access to, I feel fairly lucky to have caught one particular set of items on display by only one of them, just days into August, before they were almost immediately cleaned out by customers. I made off with two of these rare treasures, one of which I could immediately count among my new all-time favorite finds.
SO cool is the item in question - at least to me - that I've decided to save it and its brethren for an article entirely their own, so, stay tuned for that I guess! WHAT COULD IT BE!?!
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