How about one thread to post all unusual Christmas stories? (You know you want to read some weird stuff about Christmas.) I will start with a story about when "praying" and "Christmas tree" apparently don't mix. Just a little something to help you sleep at night, if you buy a live tree every year. "T'was the night before Christmas, when all through the house. Not a creature was stirring, except for . . ." Family is horrified to discover Christmas tree is bursting with baby praying mantises Gee, I hope all the warm air inside the house doesn't cause those eggs to hatch! DOH! (These people need to work on their rhyming, BTW.) That should cheer them up.
“I raise praying mantises, they are cute and harmless. Each egg sac though can hatch between 50-200 babies,” someone commented. It certainly seemed like more than that... Ask me how I know.
Me and my sons were out of town on a hunting trip a few weeks before Christmas about 7-8 years ago. Wife and dog left alone and the wife decorated the tree while we were gone. Late in the evening on Saturday there’s a loud crash in the living room. Scared as hell she grabs her pistol out of the nightstand and proceeds down the hallway only to draw down on a fallen tree! She’ll never live that one down.
I do recall a couple of Christmas pranks from my childhood (yes, you can play pranks at Christmas!). The first was when my older brother decided to punish a younger brother (6 yrs old) for being bratty on Christmas Eve. He removed all of the candy from the boy's stocking and replaced it with potatoes (we didn't have coal) and wooden spoons, then told him that Santa was really pissed at him. Of course, he believed it and started crying. The other prank I instituted, because the youngest children were setting their alarms to an hour earlier every year. One year it was 6:00 a.m., the next was 5:00 a.m. (My parents could sleep through anything, so they weren't bothered unless it got really loud.) The third year, I decided to put a stop to it before getting woken up at 4:00 a.m. I set my alarm to 3:00 a.m., and set about sneaking into the other kids' rooms in the house on my hands and knees ninja style, unplugging their alarm clocks. Then I reset my alarm to 6:00, went back to sleep, and got up when I wanted to. Everyone else got up at 7:00, except for the bratty brother, who slept in until 9:00. He cried because he "missed Christmas".
