HOUSTON — (WARNING: This story is full of bad to the bone puns. Enter at your own risk!)
Drive around just about any Houston neighborhood and you'll see that outdoor Halloween decorations and elaborate displays are more popular than ever.
A very creative and clever couple in west Houston even changes their to-die-for displays daily, much to the delight of neighbors who look forward to it every October.
The skeleton crew of Holly and Ben Sweet are the brains behind the annual shenanigans of Skelly and Mr. Bones, who are BFFs for eternity. This year's "humerous" theme features a time travel machine that takes them on their very own Eras Tour.
Their adventures have included the dinosaur age, Egypt's Great Pyramids and Cleopatra, the Renaissance, the wild West and even into a trip to the future for the 2024 presidential election.
"Today they reached 2024 and won the presidency," Holly told us on Friday. "I wanted to submit today’s scene as potential comic relief from your serious political news stories."
Make no bones about it, photos of the adventures of Skelly and Mr. Bones are guaranteed to tickle your funny bone! They even have their own bad-to-the-bone Facebook and Instagram accounts.
This year's displays became a family affair.
"My husband Ben is handy and helps build the props, like the wagon and the time machine. He has also strung wires between the pine trees to hoist props and skeletons for aerial poses," Holly said. "My kids help me paint sometimes, but they are young, so mostly they enjoy being surprised by seeing what the skeletons do next and playing with the sets after the skeletons are done with them."
She said in past years they did one scene and left it but now they've added a fog machine, animation and lights.
"This year we started planning and building in the summer," Holly said. "And for the first time I made the whole month one continuous saga told day-by-day with story book pages on the days they traveled in the time machine. It's been fun."
The Sweets must be bone tired because "tibia" honest, they are knocking 'em dead with their bone-chilling, spine-tingling displays. Bad bone puns aside, we hope you enjoy the photos as much as we did cause we're dying over here!
