Madlibbin' around the Christmas tree

Oh the memes they come, they're all going and coming,¹
But 'twas this one from Kimmy that got my brain humming.²
And I thought, "hey now! wouldn't it make her heart warm
If my answers derived from that old MadLibs form!"³

::Michael Palin runs in:: Stop that! Stop that! No more poetry!

Arright. And no, I haven't answered yet. Emily's left for school and I need to have her fill in the verb/noun/whatever answers to make the reply post useful. However, it did give me an idea for this blog (see note 2 above, or is it below?)- a holiday chance to share what was once a famous, and annually repeated, MadLibs riff on that same classic Kissmoose poem.

Let me explain.

For many a Sunday night from around 1990-something until about two years ago, trivia players on AOL gave up their usual showoffs of knowledge for an hour to play instead at sheer stupidity. Naturally, I was the host at the end of this venture. Instead of correct answers (though they did count, too), you got points for creative ones, and this bunch was (still is, I suppose) nothing if not creative. The founder of this format is a Friend of this page, as is the one who was still hangin' on as my dear co-host at the time of the game's sad demise.

One Sunday night, I was bored, unprepared or both, so I decided to have the players create their own version of The Night Before Christmas in MadLibs form. Not that they knew it at the time. They just served up "a place," "an animal," and so on. I picked the best (i.e., weirdest) answers to fit the format and ran it as the Christmas game the next week, and for several Christmases to follow. Their answers stand alone, though,⁴ as a perfectly proper Christmas poem which I now share here.  Their answers are whited out below the cut; roll your mouse over each one if you want to play along, as it were, or highlight the whole block to read the whole thing.  And thanks again to Pengie and Tink and the 20-odd other participants to this madness for making this a part of my own holiday experience.⁵


( Twas the night before Christmas )

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¹ And always too soon.
² Always a dangerous thing.
³ The old guy assumes everyone here knows what MadLibs is. (Are?) Naturally, like everything else in the known universe, they have a Wikipedia entry that should 'splain it all.
⁴ Along with the cheese.
⁵ Well, that and, as the incomparable Joshilyn Jackson put it in her own blog the other day, "my special jacket with the long long sleeves that go ALL the way around. Twice. And the type of fat crayons that can easily be held between the toes."