Definite
Finished = dark red.
Working on it = dark green.
Waiting for parts = dark blue.
Haven’t even started = normal text.
- Christmas chain letter. Because everyone can use good luck. This one is targeted toward one person in my house, I’m thinking of personalizing each letter to the recipient and sending this to others. I may be coming up with a few different letters if I have time.
- Vintage, tacky pot holders and oven mitts. Picked these up at a sale for $1. It’s a minor prank, so it’s only waiting in the wings if one of the others falls through. Still, I bet it’ll get a reaction from Stressed, Sloppy Organizer or Crabby Mary Poppins. Slacker Chef will like them, and Crabby Old Man probably won’t notice.
- Restaurant-style bathroom signs for the bathrooms with santa hats and/or mustaches.
- Hidden pine air fresheners in every room. (Good ones, I can make these myself so it won’t smell like a rental car.)
- Living room replacement art. “Stressed, Sloppy Organizer” is obsessed with the artwork in the house. She watches all those HGTV shows, too. Well, she keeps complaining about how much we need new artwork in the living room, but no one else dares to touch it. She’ll just love my selections of surreal / disturbing snowmen.
- Proximity-sensor rigged singing card. This will be open on the mantle and will start singing loudly when anyone approaches! Electronics all work, now constructing the card.
- Custom-recorded Christmas carol(s) in a very unusual style, on loop, on the kitchen stereo. One of the housemates (Crabby Old Man) keeps leaving it on depressing old NPR with its doom-and-gloom Ebola forecast, politics, and wars. All I need to do is burn this to CD. And possibly write another one. Because the first was so much fun to write.
- A real, traditional fruitcake. It’s done, just needs to age and get put in an old shoebox.
- Lovely lollipop lawn decor. I was going to go with a garden light solution, but we get so little light that they may not charge, especially with partly shading the small solar panel! They might also get buried in snow because the solar stakes are not tall. Instead, we’re going with a low-tech approach involving paper plates.
- Bathroom paint (yes I have a lot of bathroom pranks because they’re FUNNY). Homemade “paint” on tiles of the shower. Just needs testing.
- Tacky garlands or bows. We have a wide doorway in our 3-story Victorian house. It is the separation between living room and dining room. It really needs some holiday cheer, if you know what I mean. I’ll have to hit the garage sales for this, or take matters into my own hands and go to some dollar store clearance sections.
- Bearding and “hatting” the mirrors. Ho, ho, ho – everyone will be Santa now!
- 5 (or more) golden rings. Gold food paint + donuts, left on the counter. Enough said? I think a coconut donut will look particularly delightful, painted gold. Tested and works! All we need to do is launch it.
- Custom printed holiday toilet paper in the bathrooms, also in my famous angry snowman motif.
- Toilet paper tower of power. So, we got 96 rolls of toilet paper, and we’re covering them with green tissue paper so we can build a “tree” on the table. Maybe I will top it off with a plunger.
- Custom holiday photo puzzle. Crabby Mary Poppins adores puzzles. She takes over one end of the dining room table every year for her kittens-in-hats Christmas puzzle or whatever. Ordered, waiting for delivery.
- Rock friends for the lawn. Everyone loves a rock friend, especially with a Santa hat. Or green and red stripes. Materials collected — we just need to get making.
- “Put a bird on it.” Crabby Mary Poppins and especially Stressed, Sloppy Organizer LOVE LOVE LOVE Portlandia with cutesy hearts coming off their heads. That’s how I know when they watch it – the hearts rising from them. Anyway, I thought I’d put a bird on it. By “it” I mean “everything.” With Santa hats of course.
- Easter eggs with Christmas candy in them. Or something else? I don’t know. Candy is so boring. I’m thinking amulets and artifacts of power are much better, and more my style.
- Bizarre tree topper. I’ve done this before, but it’s a classic. What say we do some kind of rainbow peace sign with feathers and LEDs? Blinking ones… A crown? It’ll come to us.
- More-than-life-sized cardboard Santa or elf with the house dog’s face. Dog faces are funny. It’s a law of humor.
- A real custom-printed cereal box that looks like the “real thing” + special flavored cereal. This is possible! I found a printer who will do the printing, I can just spray a flavoring on some honey nut O’s, and I can theoretically dehydrate marshmallows in my house’s oven.
- Large, evil snowman concrete tabletop fountain with an ultrasonic mister instead of water. Fog will (hopefully) come out of its mouth!
- Eggnog-flavored jello shots in the fridge. Disgusting or delightful? I just don’t know! I have all the stuff, I just need to make them the day before launch.
- A lovely (tacky) Santa toilet seat cover, rug, and tissue box. It’s cheap felt and really ugly!
- THE ROOMBA ELF. This is going to be epic. I have a Roomba that works. I will have a Santa hat. I am an early riser. Christmas morning is going to be awesome!
Hopefully I can pull these off.
- Ugly Christmas mug collection. Two of the housemates (Crabby Mary Poppins and Stressed, Sloppy Organizer) obsess about the kitchen’s appearance. Since they both worked at Crate & Barrel, they even stack the “white only” mugs with their handles aligned. I want to get my hands on at least 10 ugly holiday mugs and do the old switcheroo. But finding these is a crapshoot. I could buy them on Ebay but seriously. Surely I can start a local collection.
- A rainbow snowman. We may or may not get snow this year — it could go either way in Chicagoland. But if we do, I’ll continue my evil snowman theme and make an evil snowman with imported snow (lugged in a little red wagon) and some “pee paint” — colored water made with Wilton coloring in squirt bottles.
- Old Santa’s Soda. Thing 2 was intrigued by my tale of (bad) homemade root beer and came up with the idea of creating wacky flavored soda. We have the bottles and capper… We could totally do this.
Substitute / backup pranks.
- Our classic Mario question box appearing somewhere in the common rooms, with a different kind of (unusual) candy in it every day. The only reason this isn’t on our “definite” list is because we already have an Easter egg hunt, and because we already used the Mario tree topper in the past.
- Christmas “ugly sweater” style beer cozies. There are always beers in the fridge, and they totally need some holiday spirit. Pipe cleaner antlers may or may not be made as well.
- Window sock friends. Hey, it’s an old house, and even though our storm windows are down and all, many of the windows are still drafty. So, I thought I’d make some sand-filled window sock friends with reindeer antlers or something. Or maybe they’ll just look like worms with elf hats…
- Flavored coffee switcheroo. Eggnog flavored? Mint mocha? Something “custom” that I whip up? This is a bit mean, I admit, but Crabby Old Man deserves to have his cage rattled. Plus, he actually does have a good sense of humor about stuff like this.
- Christmas cupcakes with surprises or fortunes inside – I’m thinking a traditional charm on a string will work (so no one bites into something metal.) This one is too “nice” so I don’t know if it really counts as a prank. Maybe if we take a bite out of each one, first… Or make them unusual flavors (hot pepper + pine?)
- “Letters to Santa.” If I can work out how to make realistic mail forwarding stickers. Everyone will write me letters to Santa, and I will make it look like they all came to our house by mistake. I hope to get my friend who works at the post office to stamp them all for me, or help me do one of those yellow stickers. If it doesn’t look official, though, it’s not worth doing. I have other pranks to launch.
- A bizarre holiday card every day. From people we don’t know. I’m getting a lot of people in on this so it is truly random. My son’s elementary school friends are my army of card-makers.
Christmas Prank Advent Calendar: 25 Days, 25+ Pranks 