Weird TraditionsTalking with a friend yesterday about school dinners, she suddenly said, "We had to march into the dining room behind the School Band... except on Thursdays." Since all of us were now staring, she qualified this with, "...on Thursdays there was no wind section. It was a tradition."
What weird stuff have you been made to do "because it's a tradition."
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chthonic, Thu 28 Jul 2005, 11:11)
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Stealing the Christmas Tree. It's traditional!We never used to buy a Christmas tree. We always stole ours from the local wood. My dad, as mentioned in a previous post is ex-special forces and would set this up for us as a 'mission' (us being three small children - I was the youngest of the (not very) l33t four person team, aged 7).
My dad would take us for a recce in the daytime to locate a suitable 'target'. After a suitable tree...I mean target, had been selected my dad would post all three of us as look outs, one each of us a suitable distance in both directions down the track and one by him to relay our signals in the event of 'enemy contact' (i.e. normal people out for a stroll, forestry workers, other tree thieves etc).
Once he had set us all up, he would whip out the saw he was carrying inside his jacket, quickly saw the tree down and take it a bit further back into the undergrowth to hide it for later 'extraction'. He would darken the remaining tree stump with mud to hide tree felling activity and we then went home.
After darkness fell he would reassemble the team and we would drive back to the woods to extract our target. After waiting a suitable period to adjust our eyes to night vision, we would head into the (totally dark and bloody scary if you're seven) wood, where the sentry tasks would be replayed and we would then bundle the tree down the track into our car then go home with it.
It's probably worth pointing out that although my upbringing has given me a liberal attitude to property (I saw it, it's mine, I'm having it) and I am on the wrong side of sanity as far as ownership of medieval weapons goes, I luckily remain alive and lacking in serious criminal convictions.
I don't know if this started a tradition of theft in my family but I *did* try and steal a helicopter a year later, at a regiment family day (when I was eight, long story but the reason I failed to get it off the ground and why I'm therefore still alive to tell the unlikely but true tale, is that I didn't know how the collective worked - got the engines started and the rotors going round nicely though - you've never seen an RAF helicopter pilot leg it so fast from the beer tent to bodily smack a small child out of a helicopter).
(, Mon 1 Aug 2005, 14:17, Reply)
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