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"How the Grinch stole Holiday Tea"
Dec. 10th, 2004 01:30 pmI thought I'd posted this old satire I wrote my senior year of college here before, but apparently not. It's in the vein of An Ode to IT, another Hood College-centered parody that I wrote strictly out of frustration with a certain policy. Since the holiday season is upon us, I thought it'd be appropriate to repost it here.
Backstory: For the longest time, Hood College had a holiday tradition - Holiday Tea and the dorm decorating contest. It was customary for the competing dorms to stay up ALL NIGHT beforehand and go all out in decorating their dorms with garlands, paper, whatever to win the contest. My dorm, Coblentz, won quite a bit - and we went all out.
In the fall of 2000, we got a new president - and suddenly, out of the blue, the Fire Marshal's office suddenly started demanding that NO PAPER or flammable materials should be put up on the walls of the dorms because the burn time was so short. The office was talked into permitting posters in rooms, paper on doors and on common bulletin boards, but NOTHING ELSE.
So we were essentially told a week before Holiday Tea that we couldn't use any paper or anything remotely flammable for Holiday Tea decorating or we'd be disqualified. Well, dammit, that narrowed down our options EXPONENTIALLY! It killed most of the ways we could decorate the wings and shot our dorm president's theme idea all to hell. Naturally, I was pissed off, and ended up writing this little parody, which we read for the judges when they came to see our sparsely-decorated but legal decorating job.
(In the end, Memorial Hall "broke the rules" and went all out with paper et al. They won - because they had a cinder block dorm, hence the quotes, so they could go all out, and the Fire Marshal apparently NEVER SHOWED UP. If I ever meet the official responsible for this incident, I'll throw Marriott pork chops in his face. But this parody got a lot of laughs. Footnotes for the non-Hoodlums are included.)
( How the Grinch Stole Holiday Tea )
( Footnotes for non-Hoodlums )
Backstory: For the longest time, Hood College had a holiday tradition - Holiday Tea and the dorm decorating contest. It was customary for the competing dorms to stay up ALL NIGHT beforehand and go all out in decorating their dorms with garlands, paper, whatever to win the contest. My dorm, Coblentz, won quite a bit - and we went all out.
In the fall of 2000, we got a new president - and suddenly, out of the blue, the Fire Marshal's office suddenly started demanding that NO PAPER or flammable materials should be put up on the walls of the dorms because the burn time was so short. The office was talked into permitting posters in rooms, paper on doors and on common bulletin boards, but NOTHING ELSE.
So we were essentially told a week before Holiday Tea that we couldn't use any paper or anything remotely flammable for Holiday Tea decorating or we'd be disqualified. Well, dammit, that narrowed down our options EXPONENTIALLY! It killed most of the ways we could decorate the wings and shot our dorm president's theme idea all to hell. Naturally, I was pissed off, and ended up writing this little parody, which we read for the judges when they came to see our sparsely-decorated but legal decorating job.
(In the end, Memorial Hall "broke the rules" and went all out with paper et al. They won - because they had a cinder block dorm, hence the quotes, so they could go all out, and the Fire Marshal apparently NEVER SHOWED UP. If I ever meet the official responsible for this incident, I'll throw Marriott pork chops in his face. But this parody got a lot of laughs. Footnotes for the non-Hoodlums are included.)
( How the Grinch Stole Holiday Tea )
( Footnotes for non-Hoodlums )
