Day of the Dead

We love Halloween around the flower shop. Some of our crew is dressed up today, we have a wolf, a baby and even some creative Day of the Dead makeup. So we got to thinking… why end the celebration with Halloween when we can enjoy Dia de los Muertos, Day of the Dead?


Day of the Dead, celebrated on November 1^stand 2^nd, is primarily a Mexican holiday that focuses on gatherings of family and friends to pray for and remember lost loved ones.  

Traditionally those celebrating visit the graves of family members that have died to tidy them up and build altars honoring the deceased using decorative sugar skulls, marigolds and other flowers. They also leave the favorite foods and beverages of the departed as gifts.

 

Offerings for the souls of the dead.

The intent is to encourage visits by the souls, so the souls will hear the prayers and the comments of the living directed to them.

 

Elegant Skulls for Day of the Dead

While this may seem like a sad occasion, Dia de los Muertos usually takes on a jovial tone, as celebrants remember funny events and anecdotes about the departed. La Calavera Catrina, “The Elegant Skull”, is the most iconic image of Day of the Dead celebrations. Sugar skulls are elaborately decorated as offerings and senoritas paint their faces to portray elegant Catrinas as part of the celebration. Orange Mexican marigolds, sometimes referred to as Flor de Muerto or “Flower of the Dead”, are the traditional flower used to honor the dead.

 

All of the beautiful flowers and imagery of Day of the Dead are not totally foreign to us, we have done more than a few themed weddings for the occasion. So we took our inspiration from our Day of the Dead experience, Mexican traditions, and our love of flowers and headed to one of the local cemeteries to create an altar and shoot a few photos.

 

Jessi Rose, our floral design apprentice and resident dress up doll, was painted like a Catrina and given a beautiful bouquet of marigolds, roses, zinnias, asters, mums and calla lilies. We designed flowers for her hair in blooms to match with accents of blue hydrangea.

 

Our offerings included a bowl of fruit, a bottle of tequila (a popular offering for Dia de los Muertos celebrations) and skulls hand painted by our designers in iconic Mexican styling.

 

We brought along more flowers as well, a bouquet of gladiolus, another popular flower for the occasion, and another bouquet to match our model’s with more lovely marigolds and lots of yellow Jerry’s balls. These bouquets were left at the cemetery as offerings to Jessi Rose’s grandparents who are at rest there.

 

We hope everyone enjoys today’s haunting Halloween celebrations and that you embrace the fun, tradition, and remembrance of Dia de los Muertos!

 

Hurricane Sandy

Hurricane Sandy hit us hard! We lost power at our Burlington, NJ location until late Tuesday, roads were a mess, our iconic neon sign at our Philadelphia location was damaged, and our NJ sign blew down… again. Some of our employees are still without power.

But we didn’t let it stop us from having fun! We tried to make deliveries to our customers… It was more than a little breezy!

 

We hope everyone weathered to storm ok .  Stay safe!

Stop Bullying!

Almost everyone has been affected by bullying in some way. Whether you have been bullied yourself, have been a bully, or have witnessed bullying.

 

It is an epidemic that is sweeping our nation, causing pain, sorrow, and in the worst circumstances, death. Suicide as a result of bullying, known as bullicide, is an unfortunate reality that we hear about all too often on the news and in our communities.

 

October is Bullying Prevention and Awareness Month, so we thought it would be the perfect time to remind everyone that bullying is a real problem and it is not ok.

As in all things that we do, we always look to flowers to guide us, so we used a traditional technique for designing floral set pieces and created a floral plaque to convey our message:  Stop Bullying.

We then invited Stein’s employees, family, friends and neighbors to hold our sign and say something inspirational about bullying.

 

 

This created a rather touching and inspirational video. We hope you enjoy it and that you do your part to end the cycle of bullying, this month and always. Speak up, stand up, and don't let anyone be bullied.

 

Some statistics about bullying:

·         1 out of every 4 teens are bullied.
·         As many as 160,000 students stay home on any given
          day because they’re afraid of being bullied.
·         1 out of every 5 kids admits to being a “bully” or doing
          some bullying.
·         282,000 students are physically attacked in
          secondary schools each month.
·         80% of the time an argument with a bully will end up
          in a physical fight.
·         On the playground, a child is bullied every 7 minutes…
   o   4% of the time an adult intervenes,
   o   11% of the time a peer intervenes,
       o   85% of the time no one intervenes.
·         97% of middle schoolers are bullied while online.
·          33% of students have heard another student threaten
          to kill someone.


When we visited our neighbors at the convenient store we caught this young man off guard with our large sign and camera. When we told him what we were doing he was so moved that he opened up and said that he too had been bullied and would be happy to be in our video. Thank you for helping us spread this important message.

For more information about bullying prevention  visit

http://www.stopbullying.gov

Oppa Stein Your Florist Style, Our Gangnam Style Parody

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ve probably heard South Korean rapper Psy’s infectiously catchy hit song “Gangnam Style,” seen the awesomely entertaining and popular music video, and maybe even busted some of his signature horse-riding dance moves.



Patrick "Psy" Kelly poses with Steins designer Jennifer,
video editor and director, and our mystery
yellow suited dancer.

Gangnam is a district of Seoul, Korea that Psy has likened to Beverly Hills, CA, with lavish lifestyles and posh people. The music video is a comical antithesis of Gangnam’s actual swag with its humorous dance, fashion and lyrics. The song is about the perfect girlfriend who knows when to be refined and when to get wild.



"Psy" with one of his supporting actors

After seeing Psy’s live performance on the Today Show we found ourselves constantly dancing and singing around the shops (the English words as well what we are sure was an unfortunate butchering of the Korean ones). A week after catching the Gangnam Style fever with no cure in sight, we decided to film our own “Gangnam Style” parody, “Oppa Stein Your Florist Style!” Our flowers have a certain swag ;-)

The original video features scenes around the Gangnam district, while ours features our shops, staff, and, of course, flowers.



Patrick gets his unruly Elvis wig Gangnam styled.

Patrick, Stein’s owner and operator, took on the role of Psy, donning an Elvis style wig and some funky colored suit jackets from the local thrift stores. While his dance moves aren’t nearly as on point as Psy’s, he made up for it with lots of energy and beautiful flowers.

"Psy" posing with some of his
dance crew.

The rest of the Steins crew was excited to fill the supporting roles, help behind the scenes, design bouquets, film and edit our spoof. It’s amazing we captured any footage where we weren’t laughing!



Our mystery yellow suited dancer.

One of our top designers, who asked to remain nameless, dressed as the yellow suited dancer. The disguise was so good that people that know her didn’t even recognize her and passers-by stopped in their cars to take pictures.

"Christine" models with the other ladies while
"Psy" screams at his favorite thing... flowers.

We were short one female dancer the day we filmed our version of Psy’s yoga scene, so we convinced Chris, one of our newest employees, to dress as “Christine” in a cute black dress and big curly black wig to do a little bouquet modeling and dancing for us. He’s such a good sport!



Elevator dancer Pat C.

We would like to thank the extra dancers from the community that showed up on the scene while we were filming to do the horsey dance with us… We found ourselves to be attracting quite a crowd while dancing outside the store on the corner of Frankford and Princeton, we must have looked like a flash mob!

 

We had an amazing time filming our parody and we hope you enjoy watching it!! And be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, you never know what we’ll be up to next!