If my brother and I had a motto, an unspoken motto, growing up it
would have been, 'Always be Pranking'. We always did and still mostly
do just love a good joke or tease and will go to pretty good effort
to pull of a little something or another. It was always really funny
to us but sometimes my mom or dad or both would think our jokes were
not that funny and we would get into big trouble. One really great
joke we pulled off was when my mom, who is not typically a Christmas
letter writer, wrote a Christmas letter on our computer and left it
there all willy-nilly like she didn't have a care in the world about
a couple of boys sabotaging her one attempt at decency. Matt and I
found the letter full of all the regular intolerable drivel about how
everything is awesome and all kids are smart and cool and how much
fun we are all having and how we hope you noticed that we are just a
little bit more cool than all of you all this blessed season. No, no
and hell no. We sprang into action to fix this travesty of a letter,
first of all we removed all references to anything uplifting and
included juicy true tidbits about family dysfunction, in a funny and
light way, of course. We included information about my dad's rage
hitting and uncontrolled anger, about my mom hitting us with back
scratchers, little stories about how my mom was starting to wonder if
my little sister was retarded or just really, really, really slow.
Good stuff. We then most helpfully printed out all the copies my mom
needed and helped her send them off without so much as a second
glance on her part. Then in a few days the calls started coming in
about how that was the funniest thing they had ever read and that she
had the funniest sense of humor, and she was really confused because
she didn't think the family news she had shared was very funny, and
it wasn't. The worse part was is that she didn't just laugh off the
joke when she read the letter she got really sad and cried which made
us have to apologize profusely for the best joke we had ever
masterminded. Now I am not sorry, I am proud of my naughtiness and I
would do it again. She learned her lesson though and has never written one of those unforgivable missives again. We do have a great time as a family mocking the pathetic attempts at self-aggrandizement that are foisted upon us yearly. People should let their wicked boys have a stab at editing that trash into something more entertaining, and memorable.
