Odd Traditions

One of the other threads got me to thinking about something my DBs, DS and I used to do when we were kids. An odd tradition of sorts. It was something I had forgotten all about...it went like this...

Whenever one of us kids (3 boys, 2 girls) would have a friend over for dinner we would be going along with our meal normally then, someone (usually one of my DB would start it) would say to someone else, "Hey, you have my fork! Why did you take my fork? Give it to me." Then they would exchange forks. Of course, this started a chain reaction all around the table of fork exchanging and who had who's fork. The guest would usually be included in the chaos, having their fork taken from them and replaced with someone else's.

Mom would sit yelling, "No one has a special fork! Stop it! Cut it out!" (which we just ignored), or she would realize from the get-go that it was futile to fight us and she'd just laugh and roll with the punches.

Guests usually sat silent through the whole onslaught, trying to keep track of their own fork as it passed from person to person. One time we even had a guest who was a friend of one of my DB's who joined in and got his fork back! That one was the best!

At the end of our charade my Mom or older DS would always offer the guest a clean fork...but first they'd make sure no one had dibs on it.


We always spend Thanksgiving with my DB (who I think may be the one who first started this) and this year in the middle of dinner I'm going to tell him he has my fork and that I want it back!

So, do I really come from a totally insane family or are there others out there with crazy, odd traditions like this one?

I was still in my 30's falling for Dad's "Hey Sandy, pull my finger".
On Thanksgiving Day it is tradition that my oldest brother stick his face in a chocolate pie . ( and he's a grandpa) no wonder our kids are silly.

P.S. That fork thing is a riot!

This message was edited Oct 19, 2007 10:41 AM

It's a tradition for us to have chili on Halloween... I don't think that's as cute as the forks, but it's what we usually do at Halloween.

No, Heather, you are the only strange person here! If I can't choose between plants, I will line them up and toss a paper airplane at them. Let the air currents decide for me. You should see the looks on peoples faces at Lowes! Priceless!!!

We had another thing we used to do, not so much a tradition, but just something fun. Whenever we'd have a dog that was all white (which we always seemed to?) we'd "dye" the dog with food coloring. My Mom decorated cakes as a hobby, so we had access to the highly concentrated paste food colorings...in a rainbow of colors. Our dogs were electric blue, ballerina pink, pumpkin orange, fire engine red, shamrock green and any other color we could mix up. This was loooooong before kids dyed their hair funky colors, so the reactions we got were unusual. Some folks would stare, some would laugh, some would ask how we did it.

I had a Boxer, Rocky, who was all white ("bad" breeding). I used to take him with me on my paper route. One day I decided he'd look better as a green dog, so I got out Mom's food coloring. Later I took him with me to pick up my papers at the Press Office. I tied him to the parking meter like I always did when I went in to get my papers. The ladies inside the office were going crazy laughing over the green dog outside....

The next paper that came out had a little write up in it about my green dog. I should have cut it out and kept it. All I remember is they wrote something about if you think seeing pink elephants is bad keep your eyes open for the green dog that delivers our newspapers!


BTW, the food coloring never hurt the dogs and always washed right out. Go ahead and try it! Put some food coloring on a paper towel and wet it then rub it on your dog. It's as easy as that. If you want to get real creative you can put flowers and spots and rings around your dogs eyes if you want to. Think purple dog with pink polka dots. For some reason my DH won't let me get a white dog...spoil sport.

heathrjoy, cute stories; I'd liked to have been living in your neighborhood. Sounds like great fun.

Oh, there were bad things too, lol. It wasn't all fun. We were just creative children.

Two of my DBs practiced "fake fighting" all the time. They would get so close to punching each other that you couldn't see they missed. They even got so good at it that they had all the sounds down too. This was something they picked up from watching movies.

Our neighbor, Sam, who lived down back was in his 80's. Poor, poor Sam. The boys just harassed him sometimes to get a reaction out of him. One day they decided to try their fake fighting out on Sam to see if he believed it. He believed it alright.

He started yelling stuff like, "You can't hit someone like that, you'll cause permanent damage! Leave your brother alone! I'm calling your Mother! You boys are gonna kill each other!" and tried to break up the fight....as best as an 80 yr old can break up two teenage boys fighting. Poor Sam. They were lucky they didn't give him a heart attack.


Then there was the neighbor who had the soda pop machine. It was an old-type machine that dispensed the little bottles. This same neighbor had kids that were.....well....they took lots of things that didn't belong to them (later some of them made a career out of that type of "work" unfortunately). A few times those kids took things that belonged to us, or we would have arguments with them over who knows what. Our answer to everything was to wait till dark and send my one DB over to the soda pop machine with a pitcher. He'd open all the bottles of pop and let them drain into the pitcher. Every time we'd get a mix of different kinds of soda, but we were kids and didn't really care that we were drinking cola-orange-red-lemon lime flavored soda. Yuck!! What a stupid thing to do, but as kids we felt like we had won. That was an on-going battle for many years with the Soda Pop family, lol.

On birthdays, we made a wish before we blew out the candles. Then Mom cut the cake. The birthday person couldn't talk until they ate their piece of cake or their wish wouldn't come true. The rest of the family did everything we could to make that person talk!

That's cute!

My father always puts the turkey butt on my oldest sister's plate on Thanksgiving. Do you know I was grown before I realized it wasn't something good? I was jealous that he liked her best.

At Christmas, everyone comes to my house in their pajamas for breakfast and present opening. No one gets dressed until noon if we get dressed at all. (we go to Christmas eve church services.) My husband hands out the gifts, and we throw all the wrapping paper at him until he is sitting in a pile. The Grandkids just LOVE this tradition. I have no clue how it started.

This one is terrible. I would take the kids to Florida on spring break without their father because he couldn't get off work. All of daddy's rules went out the window. We ate ice cream sandwiches for breakfast, stayed up late, had junk food at the beach, and I let the kids say naughty words if we were in the car/cheap hotel. They still laugh about those weeks away from discipline (not that they were ever really bad.)

That's cute, imagining a man sitting in a pile of Christmas wrap.

My younger brother made a tradition of just our own. Every week I was sent to the laundry mat to clean clothes, well I would insist my little brother go with me to help, and could we please have the change for pop?? Well he could get his little arm up into the pop machine and knock all the pop out of there we could drink. Then we could use the extra change to ride the dryers!!
Hmmm, explains alot to me now!

...ride the dryers... hhhmmmmmmm. Sounds scarey and hot to me!!!

They had a cool setting, fluff I think. It was fun. We didn't have many toys! LOL

When DH passed away at 47 we decided that each year we would search for the 'special' ornament..the tree decorating consist of family getting together and placing the ornament 'in memory of' husband/dad/grand father...

That's what the kids today are missing out on... not enough toys so they have to use their imagination... We used to play with fire back behind the garbage can. We had little pieces of paper and matches. I don't know where my mom was....

Betty, that is one of the best traditions of all. :)

My DH's family has their own tradition of sticking their tongue out at any camera or camcorder that happens to be pointed at them. I know lots of folks do that...but an entire family...and now all the kids and grandkids too? I think they should all get together for a nice, professional picture...but all stick out their tongues! Anyone who knows them would get it.

OMG Heathrjoy...Roger absolutely hated having his photo taken so as does your family, when I or someone else would take a photo of him he'd make a face..that was ok but how I would have loved some nice photo's !

I hear you Betty. Folks never think about that stuff. My DH is so against his pic being taken...he always blocks his face. I don't know how he does it so fast, even if I surprise him to take a pic he still manages to block his face. I've got pics of him with a normal body but with my Mom's cat for a head, one where he's "wearing" wallpaper to block the camera and another where he flipped a huge piece of plywood from one side of his body to the other to block the camera. Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. *Sigh.*

We may not end up with good pics, but the process of trying to get them sure is fun and unforgettable!

This is way out there... but funny to my mom sis and me..... One Thanksgiving, my dad (now deceased) broke the little thingy that holds the turkeys legs together. To keep the stuffing from falling out, he used a paper clip and stuck everything together. I was a teenager at the time, and the guy I was dating came for Thanksgiving dinner. He walked in, and saw the paper clip, and said "OMG!!!! Who paper clipped the turkeys butt together?" We all about fell over laughing. So now, when someone says "OMG" one of us will say, "Who paper clipped your butt together?" Talk about people looking at you strangely!!!

Janis

LOL woofens!

Sitting here bursrting in laughter....paper clipped the turkey Butte? ahahhahaha,
Such a nice thread you have. Our family,

We enjoy a funny story at the dinner table. ocassionally I can be quite funny and sinister mean.....

This is a favorite...When we first moved into our home here, Our t-seat would fall on it's own. Kids were very young 7, 5 3.
Well we got on the subject of Ghosts, so dad always said when the seat fell it was the Ghost of Mr. Crapper! As the year went on and youngest was potty training, oldest for some reason told him there was a head in the toilet!! Poor kid was traumatized and refused to go.
Finally, we finally caught her saying this and mom was pretty mad! So...one day, I was cleaning the house and come across this little doll without a head! Found it in another room. Thought about re-attaching it, hmmmm...We have chores, the eldest get to flush stuff in the T, right...so, thinkink about how mean she was to her little bro, I, me ...decided to "plant" the little head in the toilet and close the lid!
....She had to set the pyrex down to open the lid and she did look, she screammed and barrelled out laughing the whole way...LB was trained withing the year!

HAHAHAHAHA!! worked like a charm, Would have been great for Funniest home videos! AHHH we are still telling that one.

My grandfather had a dinner tradition with two of his sons (my two uncles). When they were eating dinner and he wanted a roll, he would ask one of the boys to pass one to him. They were both very sports minded so they would ask if he wanted it passed or "hiked" to him. He would always say "hike it to me" and a roll would be thrown down the table like a football pass. My proper grandmother was not amused when this occurred, but it happened a few times with guests at the table. I wanted to start that up with my boys but my DW refused to even allow us to try it once.

Ken in Glassboro, NJ

LOL, I like this thread! Where else can you "hike" a dinner roll, paper clip a turkey butt, lol, and visit The Ghost Of Mr. Crapper? What fun!

Ghost of Mr. Crapper...Heh heh heh..

One year at Christmas, the whole family had gotten together including the out-of-town ones. My older brothers and their wives and kids, my younger brother and his girlfriend and me and my daughter. And my mom. We were at mom's and after everything was on the table, my younger brother asked what was in one of the appetizer dips. My mom got the trash can and started looking for the wrapper that had been on it. She couldn't find it right away so she dragged the can to the table and finished rummaging. My middle brother, wiseguy that he is, said, "You know, mom, we have plenty of food on the table. You don't need to eat out of the trash." The whole room started laughing, including mom.

When a family can joke like that together, it makes life wonderful.

Love the turkey butt story, too.

Giggling ... Trash for dinner How funny. Nothing like the laughter of an entire family.

I know. I sometimes don't see or talk to my brothers (I have four) for weeks at a time. When we do talk, it's like we spoke the day before. I love that.

I love that too! I've a big family as well, we talk for hours on the phone even if we just talked yesterday! The phone line for us is just like being face to face. They live 5 hours away, Many a plan has been devised over the wire...Just love the sound of the ring!

One of my brothers and I can talk six times in one day.

That is wonderful! ...Might that be your middle brother? come on tell some more.

Ever have a WATER fight? Oh my gosh had one...Hoses, buckets, cups anything to hold it, Splash at anyone, and I mean anyone coming into the path. LOL We raised all heck that day. My Bro still never got wet-he's lightening quick, that guy. Mom, and all of tried hahaha, momma even opend the dining room windows, ready to pour a bucket of ice cold! Great activity for hot sunny day...or in my family Any day.

Hope to hear some more great stories.

It WAS the middle brother. I have four of them and DH has five sisters. We've decided that's why we get along so well.