It's Halloween and time to scare the neighbors!

(please stick around for the whole post for a special video treat)

Hi Pony Riders,

Guess who still enjoys scaring the heebie jeebies out of people on Halloween...even though they have their own baby now?

This girl...

...this guy...

...and introducing KATY BELLE!

My, my, my did this year turn out well even though we changed ideas the night before Halloween!

Well, let me start by saying that the premise, regardless, was going to involve a trunk, Stefan's severed head and candy. (see above).

A little over a year ago Stefan found a great, old trunk on the street and brought it home. It was stuck closed so we never bothered to open it and used to keep the stereo on. But now we wanted to use it for Halloween which meant we had to open it.

If Law and Order has taught me anything...there was probably something in the trunk. More than likely, something dead.

So let's open that trunk!

What's in it Stefan? (please don't be a dead body, please don't be a dead body...)

OH...MY...GOD...

Halloween makeup. I kid you not....Halloween makeup was inside the trunk. It's a Halloween miracle.

There was also some weird film strip negatives and Polish postcards...and a rather unpleasant odor.

Stefan...is there anything else in the box?

STEFAN!

Ok...Biz does a little creative work with cloth and a staple gun and voila!

Now...we just need to get the front ready...with COBWEBS!

Please note PROPER cob webbing. It's not about quantity...its about thin, quality.

I promise I will get to the actual idea in a second, but there is a bit more with set up you should see. You may be aware that our good friends Kathy and Spoons moved in upstairs and so for the first time in EPIC Halloween history we were able to do a BI-LEVEL set up.

Here is Spoons with cardboard wood for boarding up windows!

And here is the lovely Mary Burke...about to become a Halloween horror story herself if she falls out that window....

Oh, you may be wondering where our 3 month old baby is during all this set up. Don't worry, the cats are watching her. It's all good.

Ok...so lets get to the story and the scaring.

The original idea involved a crazed widow who murdered her husband and put him in a trunk. I am sure you can see "problems" with this like how disturbing it is, but our problem was we couldn't come up with a good script. "ummm...I loved my husband so much I murdered him and put him in a trunk....ummm...there is candy in the trunk? Open the trunk?"

(sigh)

We knew we wanted to do something with the trunk in which kids had to reach in and get candy and Stefan's severed head would be in it. This was a given. So I came up with the idea of being a little girl who played too rough of a game of hide-and-seek with her brother.

The script was as follows:

"98...99...100! Oh Hi! Do you want to play with me?"

"My brother Brian and I were playing hide and seek. I helped him hide REAL well. My parents got so mad when they couldn't find him...I mean couldn't find ALL of him. Do you like candy? Brian left all his candy here in this trunk! Let's have candy and be best friends. I am sure Brian won't mind if we have some of his candy..."

"it's right here...in this trunk..."

"Share Brian!"

This isn't creepy right?

The spiel quickly became "Do you want to play hide and seek with me and my brother Brian? He's hiding, but he left all this candy. Do you want to share his candy with me?"

For babies, "Brian" would slowly reach his hand out of the box and give them candy.

For everyone else, I would open the trunk and they would look inside and see "Brian" and have to reach in for the candy and "Brian" would jump and yell when they reached in and everyone would scream and have a good scare.

We had a lot of repeat customers from the past from few years...all wanting a scare...except the group of teenage girls who wouldn't even stop walking while saying "we still haven't forgiven you for last year."

Here is a group of "big kids" (20 somethings). They really didn't want to reach in the trunk. The nice thing about nightfall is that Stefan really started to look like body parts and not real (we had some fake parts in the box as well). This woman reached in and touched his arm for a while saying "this feels so gross!"

Ok...please meet these extras from the Sopranos...I mean these two 12 year old boys.

OH HEAVEN FORBID YOU REACH IN THE BOX. No, no...you tough guys just stand there and talk about how your are soooooo not scared and how you "know its just a guy under the table" but whatever you do don't even come close to the box.

These two hung out forever and would not go to the trunk. This was pretty much the theme of all the preteen boys...tough enough to talk about the trunk but not tough enough to actually reach in the trunk.

Oddly...adults had weird responses to me standing there asking if they wanted to "play with me." Apparently they did not want to play with me.

Ok so here is the whole house in all its glory.

Stefan and I are excited that forever our Halloween boxes are now labeled "Brian."

So a successful year for Epic Halloween.

Every year, right before we get started, I get nervous that this is the year we have come up with something too scary or too dark...but then we get set up and the two little girls from down the street come running up to see what we have done and are ready to test their courage again this year and be rewarded with the premium candy goods we offer and at the end of the night the Grandmother and her two grandsons who had almost had heart attacks reaching in for their candy come BACK to say that "we were at the Halloween parade, but all the boys wanted to do was come back here."

They scream, their parents laugh...then we get their parents to scream and the kids laugh and everyone walks away with hopefully awesome Halloween experiences that they remember forever.

We really love doing this and my only regret is that we can't seem to last physically or candy supply wise for more than a few hours.

So here are some additional pictures...

A special shout out to the following people who made the magic happen decorating the upstairs, setting up and breaking down, refilling candy, taking pictures and most importantly watching Katy Belle! Thank you Kathy, Spoons, Mary, Jason, Jen, Kirby, Dan, Little J and Jaime.

Please come back because this year we took video and over the week will be assembly a montage of kids reactions!

And now for a special treat! Stefan found this amazing baby doll for me to carry around. He made sure it was appropriately creepy looking...not that he needed to as it was toootally creepy on its own.

Please to enjoy...

cookies from Epic Family on Vimeo.

Yep...nothing creepy about that!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Biz and Stefan

Tis a sad web they weave

I can't quite put my finger on the why...but I loathe bad webbing.

This week has been pretty nice and so I have been taking Katy Belle up to the park (Park post to come soon). On the way we pass a number of brownstones with web-centric halloween decor...and man do people web badly.

Ok...so this is the first house I walk past everyday and its the first example of bad webbing. What's wrong with this webbing you ask? We'll I don't remember seeing spiders pooping out clumps of web. (yes, yes...I know spiders aren't pooping webs, but you get what I mean.) Also, you can't really see it here, but this webbing is neon green.

I guess I just feel that if you are going to cobweb your house, you should go for authenticity and not be lazy about it.

Like this guy...

Come on. Tie a bow while you are at it.

This next one looks like someone beat up the nerd spider, stole his underwear and draped it on the flag pole...or in this case, across the bushes.

grrrrrrr...just a little effort is all I am asking for...

Toilet paper would look more authentic.

Hey, at least people are getting into the Halloween spirit...but maybe get a spider for your spider wed decorations?

I am only saying that just because alllllll of that webbing comes in the bag you bought, you don't have to use it all at once.

I did come across some more charming decorations (none of them having spider webs).

I like pumpkins.

I especially like creative pumpkins...even these spoooooky liberal pumpkins (check out the top pumpkin)

(it says PUBLIC OPTION...terrifying public option. mwa ha ha)

I like this house. Severed head hanging from the window, body park coming out of the basement, giant spider on the wall...hey there is that spider I have been looking for and oddly NO WEBBING at this house. Hey Spider, your underwear is 2 blocks over and one block down!

Here we go....good house...simple idea, clean execution.

Across the street is another classic...beautiful, subtle and yet the sort of display nightmares are made of.

Then i see this.

Nice crepe papering...OH WAIT! That's not crepe paper...THAT'S WEBBING! Where are my eggs and shaving cream? They are getting such a trick later!

Hey Biz, where is your webbing if you are so great, huh? Ok...My webbing will be up tomorrow along with the other pictures from our annual "scare the crap out of our neighborhood kids" extravaganza. Judge me then.

And now to prove that I have a heart and I am not totally ruthless when it comes to webbing...I give you this bit of joy that I came across at the end of my walk.

Here we have someone who found a small bit of webbing and made something lovely out of it. Sure, from a scary standpoint, not an A plus for webbing...but from a little bit of joy in this world standpoint...lovely.