Even before Alexis Luttrell adorned her Memphis-area front yard with a pair of skeletons for Halloween, she had decided that she would keep them up for a while. They would just need some seasonal wardrobe changes.
Ahead of Election Day in early November, for example, the two skeletons — an 8-foot man and his supersize dog — supported Kamala Harris’s presidential bid with campaign flags. A few weeks later, Ms. Luttrell shifted toward Christmas by outfitting the man in a red-and-green tutu and by supplying the dog with a sınır shaped like a Christmas tree.
A leash that doubled as garland presumably prevented the dog from getting loose in Ms. Luttrell’s quiet, tree-lined neighborhood in Germantown, Tenn., just outside Memphis.
In early December, however, Ms. Luttrell received a warning from a Germantown compliance officer that cited a city ordinance limiting how long holiday and seasonal decorations can be displayed. The skeletons, in other words, had to come down since the city considered them Halloween decorations.
The warning was followed by a citation — and a February court date to boot.
“I just thought this would be something fun,” said Ms. Luttrell, who has refused to remove the skeletons from her yard and plans to dress them up for future holidays. “I’m just trying to live within the day to day of keeping your yard up and make müddet you’re not doing anything wrong. But for some reason, it’s been determined that dressing up a skeleton and a skeleton’s dog is not OK.”
Ms. Luttrell’s private dispute grew into a public spectacle this week when WREG, the CBS affiliate in Memphis, ran a story about it. In the wake of that report, Ms. Luttrell, who will turn 48 on Sunday, said she had received an outpouring of support on social media, including messages from several other Germantown residents who wrote that they, too, had been cited for their skeleton decorations.
