Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Festooned

Here's a variety of tree-decorating I haven't seen for a while!

If it were my tree – and my teenager – I'd probably be only a little mad. Let's face it: toilet paper is designed to break down pretty easily, so it's not like you'd be looking at it for months if you didn't manage to pull it all down.

But you know the kid is probably mortified.

Have you ever TP'd someone's house?

9 comments:

  1. Never did it. We used to steal realtor's "For Sale" signs and put post them in front of friends houses while they slept. (This was as teenager, and NOT recently.)

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  2. I have TP'ed and I have been TP'ed. When I was in high school, it was kind of cool to be TP'ed, although the parents never liked it. Usually you only bothered to TP at a kid's house that you liked.

    My mom got mad at us for TPing because it was a "waste of perfectly good toilet paper!!!"

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  3. I never understood this prank, disliked looking at the results myself and thought it lacked sufficient creativity (sniff sniff), so I abstained.

    Of course, this begs the question of the alternative. One of my favorite pranks gone awry went something like this: My highschool chum lived in a fine neighborhood by a pond (in fact, his father went on to become a college president and cabinet member). I had a desperate need to dispatch a cherry bomb, but it was 11:00 at night. No problem, I told my friend, I'll just tie it to this rock, we'll touch it off, throw it in the pond and it will detonate under water. All the excitement and none of the noise. Of course, no good deed goes unpunished. Somehow my knot-tying skills let me down that night, for the most enormous blast took place on the surface of the pond, which I believe served to magnify the explosion. Lights went on all around the pond. Friends 1/2 mile away heard it in their sleep and kidded me about it on the bus. But that triumph with my cohort was offset by my friend's father never saying a word, and so the air was never cleared.

    Rick in VT

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  4. Only once did participate in this activity...and I think we just picked a random house with good trees, not the house of a friend. What dorks we were!

    BTW...this post inspired my "Surprise!" post!

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  5. Like Kathi D, in my high school, being TP'd was kind of a status symbol - kids TP'd the houses of people they liked. So, we weren't ashamed to get our house TP'd, although our parents were annoyed.

    There is something poetic about a roll of TP unfurling across the night sky... Not that I endorse the practice, of course.

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  6. Kitt - THAT kid probably isn't mortified. The kid who IS mortified is the one stuck on the Vail chairlift with his dad who had slipped off and was dangling upside-down. The Dad was hanging there, as they say in France, "sans culottes." The images went viral and were all over the Internet in a flash, as it were. AP sent it out with the headline, "Ski Bum." I won't add the URL to this refined blog, but everyone has probably seen it already anyway.

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  7. Betts, that's a funny one. In my town there was a realtor named "Head and Seamann." Their signs got stolen a lot.

    Mimi, did you soap the windows, too?

    Kathi and Beatrice, I guess that would make sense. It did seem like it was usually football players' houses that got TP'd in school.

    Rick, that's pretty awesome! No harm done but plenty of excitment. It seems to me you might be the kind of person who would disassemble a VW and reassemble it on the school roof or something.

    Martha, I thought it was serendipity. Or should I say Saran-dipity!

    Claire, yeah, probably therapy will be needed. Here's the link. I think a lifetime lift-ticket and slopeside parking might ease the pain.

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