Total offensive randomness
My family and I have some rather odd and offensive rituals which I still indulge in when I go home to visit.

Upon walking through the door I usually greet whoever's home with "Alright slags/whores/bitches?" to which my mother will sigh wearily and my sister/brother/dad will respond in kind.

In turn, my father will get home, allow our arthritic and lumpy old labrador to circle him several times making a noise we refer to as "nonsense", before walking past the lounge into the kitchen, stopping momentarily to say "gay" at whoever is occupying the room.

This has of course, backfired when we have guests and the returning party doesn't realise. Especially if they're my mum's friends. She is rarely impressed with us.

Another ritual I follow with my siblings is that of the High School Musical merchandise. We are all (and I'm sure we're not alone with this) spectacularly creeped out by Zac Efron and the whole HSM extravanganza. So we started buying each other horrid and tacky HSM items for birthdays/Christmases to wind each other up. It started with a karaoke HSM microphone, which would play two of the songs from the film when you pressed a button - which we soon turned into a "High School Musical Bomb". Whenever I had to get up early for work and I knew my sister or brother were enjoying a lie in, I would quietly open their doors, press the button and lob it as hard as possible at the bed. The inevitable result was that the microphone would crash down the side of the bed, meaning brother or sister would have to blearily crawl under their bedframe and try and retrieve the bloody thing just to get it to shut up. Needless to say the same was often done to me. We have so many HSM things in the house now it's getting beyond a joke.

Along with a lot of other posters, we also had a ritual where we would travel to see my grandparents in the Cotswolds, and whoever saw the little church in their village first would have to yell "NORTHLEACHCHURCHISAWITFIRST!!!". I usually saw it first, as I was the oldest and would often elbow my siblings out of the way, and they were as blind as bats too.

For one of my sister's earlier birthdays she got a ragdoll from one of her friends. We called it Rosie after the girl that gave it to her (spoilt brat - horrid child), and over the next couple of years Rosie the ragdoll got a voice (a mannish quality to it), a "face" (my sister would pull this face whenever Rosie was coming to get us, it involved flaring ones nostrils and developing a severe overbite) and a propensity to lose her limbs (I decided to play golf using her as the ball - the doll, not my sister - and one of her legs flew off. We buried it in the garden). After several years of abuse including setting fire to her hair and burying her "alive", she had basically disintergrated and is now located somewhere in the garden of our old house. I wonder if our successors ever did any serious landscaping and found her?

Other quick family oddities:

- Drawing a smile and a pair of sunglasses on a hollow Limpet shell and calling it Dave, giving him the personality of "serious party goer" and telling stories of how he moved so slowly that by the time he got to any parties they had already finished. My mum threw him away by accident. We never forgave her.

- Sneaking downstairs at 6 in the morning to steal the change out of my dad's coat pockets

- Making up songs that my dog would sing if she had a voice

- Singing along, operatic style, to the Lloyds bank advert tune

Ah family rituals - I didn't really even think about them until this QOTW!
(posage As I turned the corner I felt muscular and compact, Tue 25 Nov 2008, 19:39, 2 replies)

"- Sneaking downstairs at 6 in the morning to steal the change out of my dad's coat pockets"
Haha, brilliant! I recall doing similar in a vain effort to keep up with my mate's £3 a week pocket money...
( elgordo, Tue 25 Nov 2008, 20:25, closed)

Brilliant!
I think growing up in that house (assuming one ever did grow up) would have been damn fun!
(Lurkaloid awarded wanking black belt on, Wed 26 Nov 2008, 0:25, closed)