The Cellar - Dec 9th, 2018: Sharp Dressed Goose

There are people in the US who enjoy decorating their house and yard for certain holidays.
Christmas is the biggie of course, Halloween is close behind, then they pick other holidays to decorate the house and yard.
But for most every holiday they decorate their Goose. Huh?

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In suburban and rural towns across America, but mostly in the Midwest, a small but persistent subset of porches play host to these geese, whose outfits get changed seasonally, and sometimes according to the weather. You might see a goose statue dressed as a pumpkin around Halloween, or as Uncle Sam for the Fourth of July. I reported most of this story the week of Thanksgiving, and several goose owners I spoke with had dressed their geese as pilgrims for the holiday.

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Growing up in Michigan, I would regularly stop by my neighbor Shirley's house, three doors down from my parents’, to check out her goose's various costume changes. A few other homes in the neighborhood had geese as well, but I thought nothing of it until I moved to the East Coast as an adult and realized one day that I hadn’t seen a goose statue in years. Little regional quirks such as lawn geese are like the scent of home—you have to leave and come back to notice them.

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The origins of this practice are murky, but a search of local-newspaper archives and the couple lawn-ornament scholars I was able to find mostly suggested that dressed-up lawn geese first caught on in the 1980s and gained popularity through the ’90s. A brief article on lawn ornaments by the American-studies scholar Fred E. H. Schroeder in The Guide to United States Popular Culturestates, “Concrete geese, elaborately dressed in a variety of costumes, became a popular regional type in the 1980s along the upper Ohio River.”

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Slightly complicating matters, a 1998 article in the Chicago Tribune (titled “Stylish Lawn Geese Get Down Big Time”) claims an earlier debut: “Lawn geese first began popping up in American suburban front yards in the 1950s.” The trend of dressing them may be what took off in the late 20th century. “Lawn geese clothing appears to be an underground fashion rage in the 1990s,” the Tribune article continues.

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