Operation Winter Wonderland: The Gift That Kept On Giving

In high school, our friend group single-handedly brought back the old-fashioned prank. We made water parks in front lawns, duckie pools out of people’s pick-up trucks, and kidnapped a friend in order to conduct the city’s largest scavenger hunt.

But the piece de resistance was the genius of Operation Winter Wonderland.

On a lonely December afternoon, bored and looking for mischief, a friend and I decided we wanted to make our own snowstorm, since Mother Nature was being stingy that year. A mutual guy friend had been taunting us relentlessly, so he became the recipient of our little gift. Operation Winter Wonderland was born.

Using our irresistible charm, we lured our unnamed victim to my house under the guise of watching Christmas Vacation. We created an excuse to slip outside and left the boy, oblivious and happy, enjoying Chevy Chase’s infamous freak-out.

We blanketed his car in two bags of all-purpose flour and took pictures of the masterpiece. His car looked like it belonged in the northern reaches of Canada. But something was missing.

My friend remembered her father, a legendary prankster in Opelika, telling her that it was easy to cover the inside of a car with any powder just by pouring it into the outside vents under the windshield. When the driver turned the heather on, the powder would be spread everywhere. So we took the last bag of flour and shook everything we could into those vents.

We managed to convince our target it was snowing outside, and he ran to the glass front door, only to discover he was, yet again, the victim of our evil genius. After the movie was over, we watched him drive away into the night, a cloud of flour trailing behind.

On his way to work at the movie theatre the next day, he would later tell us, he turned his heater on and was surprised to find

 himself and his vehicle covered with flour. We received texts pledging retaliation and had a good laugh, not knowing the story was far from over.

While he was tearing tickets, the police walked into the theatre and asked to see the owner of a green Lumina in the employee lot. He was escorted by the officers to his car, where the interior still had a good dusting of flour. A passerby had apparently gotten suspicious that the car’s owner was a drug dealer, called the police, and a narcotics-sniffing dog had to be called in before they could write the whole thing off as a misunderstanding.

My friend and I got simultaneous text messages simply saying, “Operation Winter Wonderland: the gift that keeps on giving.” And it was.

Though I’m older and a little wiser now, the prank is still alive and well in our friend group. Regardless of economic circumstances, real, good-natured fun doesn’t take a lot of money and makes the best memories. With good people and equal parts creativity and evil genius, the old-fashioned prank will live on forever.