This can be anything, from fairy tales, white lies to protect your feelings, or outright lies to hide something from you. (Exception: Santa Claus and The Easter Bunny; everyone hears that.) I’ll start:
[list]
[li]Tunnel Trolls - My dad used to honk the car horn every time we entered a tunnel. I asked him why, and he said it was to scare away the tunnel trolls. So I did it when I started to drive. My girlfriend asked me why, and I told her. She smirked and accepted it.[/li]
I stopped doing it when I honked and the Maryland driver in front of me flashed both his brake lights and his middle finger at me.
But I want to start doing it again when my daughter gets old enough to ask why.
[li]A family that my parents had been friends with in California came to visit us in Colorado when I was about 7. Their teenage son, “Bob”, was missing a leg, and I was told that he lost it in a car accident, the same one that claimed his father. This said, I was of course afraid to ask him much about it.[/li]
Years later, I was talking about that family with my mom. I mentioned the accident, and she looked at me puzzled. She said that Bob had lost his leg to cancer. I asked about his father. He died of cancer. So, a little parallelism: car accident=cancer. The weird thing was that she didn’t remember telling me that lie.
Funny story about Bob: We went camping with them one year at a large reservoir. At one picnic area, my older siblings and him decided to go diving off of an island’s cliffs just off the shore. When it was mealtime, we yelled at them to come in. As they swam up to the beach near the picnic area, Bob saw some little kids playing. As he hopped out of the water, he started yelling, “Shark! Shark!” Scared the piss out of the little tykes. :D:D
My mom told my sister and I that a bowl of M&Ms was medicine once, and that it would make us sick, so we wouldn’t eat it. A few weeks later she bought us each a bag. I swear I thought she was trying to kill us.
My grandfather told me my dog had run away, years later I found out that it had liver failure and they had to have it euthanised. Why the hell did he think abandonment would be easier to deal with than dying of natural causes? For years I thought my dog just couldn’t stand me any more and went to find a new gig.
For a couple of years when we were kids, we would occasionally have this meat for dinner that my father claimed was “buffalo meat”. None of us particularly liked it, yet we all thought it was kind of cool to eat a buffalo. It wasn’t until my sister pointed out one day that she had heard in school that buffalo were an endangered species that my father decided to tell us the truth. It wasn’t buffalo, it was liver.
I vaguely remember another one about the origin of chicken dumplings. I can’t remember what I was told by my stepmother, but I do remember my mother’s reaction when I told her.
My dad used to tell us that a gigantic spider named Herman lived in the utility closet in our converted-into-a-playroom basement. My sister – nearing 17 years old – still refuses to go near that closet.
My grandmother told me that eating the crusts of my bread would make my hair curly. My father embellished this by saying that it would make me grow curly chest hair – not exactly an incentive for finishing my entire sandwich.
My mom and dad would consistantly tell us after we asked where one of them was: “She/He went to the moon!” It would always piss my brother and me off because we really wanted them.
Also, I can remember waiting anxiously all night long to hear hooves on the roof on christmas eve.
My dad also convinced us that when grandpa closed his eyes and sat still in his chair, he was really dead! horrible man, my dad.
I have a similar story. When I was about five, a friend of my parents died.
When I asked how she died, they told me that she fell off of a chair and died. At the time it made sense but over the years, I would think about that and wonder exactly what happened.
Did she fall off and hit her head and die from brain injuries?
Did she have a heart attack/stroke/seizure and then fall off the chair?
Was it a chair lift at a ski slope?
Anyway, last year, my parents were talking about that woman and mentioning that she had had cancer. Well, I thought, now I know that falling off the chair was just incidental. However, it turns out that now my parents swear that they have no recollection of ever telling me that she fell off a chair! I know I didn’t just make it up because that is stupid and I have lived with this belief for over twenty years!
We used to visit my grandmother in the panhandle region of Florida every summer and some Christmases. To get there, we drove past an exit for Chattahoochee. There happens to be a state mental hospital there. Mom would tell us that if we weren’t still and quiet when we drove through that region, they would come and get us and lock us up. We didn’t believe her, though, nor did she really want us to. It was just a family joke.
