Christmas Caroling the White Belts

The serge butts and zips were the whitebelts and we fish and the pissheads (sophomores) were collectively black belts. It was the “privilege” of the black belts to sing Christmas carols to the while belts during the weeks leading up to the Christmas vacation.

As I recall, it worked something like this. At 10:30 PM, after Call to Quarters when all black belts had to be at their desks studying), we would all assemble outside and congregate below or around the window of the first white belt room. We would call out to them and when they opened the window we would sing a traditional Christmas carol. When finished with the song we moved on to the next while belt room window and repeated the process until we had caroled every white belt room.

But, naturally nothing is every that simple. There was some perverse tradition that the piss heads would sing a variation of the song “Deck the Halls”. You may remember that the traditional version goes like this: “Deck the halls with boughs of holly….”

Well, the revised pisshead version was “Deck the halls with serge butt balls….”
Number one, it was not a piss head privilege to know what a serge butt was. And, of course there was the issue of the “serge butt balls”.

Consequently, the serge butt for whom the serenading was intending immediately sentenced the piss heads to pushups.

Meanwhile we fish are standing in the midst of them and it was not a fish privilege to view a piss head (or any upper classman) being crapped out. So, we are frantically looking anywhere but down. Meanwhile, the piss heads are eying us to spot even the slightest indication that one of us might catch a glimpse of them at our feet cranking out the pushups. If even one of us was detected we as a class were then also out knocking out 72 pushups.

Well, it didn’t actually work out to 72 pushups. When a piss head told a fish to knock out pushups, the piss head stated the number as his class year. In this case, we were told to give 71 pushups. But, tradition was that you never gave up a number different from your class year. So, we knocked out 72 pushups. When asked how many we did, we replied “72”. Then we were ordered to know out 71 and this time we complied.

I've often wondered how the class of 99 fared on pushups.

But, I digress. Anyway, the caroling went on until the Christmas break.

This time period was probably the most pleasant of our entire fish year, except for just before graduation when things really loosened up.

During this Christmas Holiday period we were encouraged to wear Santa hats. And, instead of our usual greeting of ‘Howdy,  Mr ________, sir” it was now “Ho, ho, ho, Mr. ________, sir”.

Tom (TE) Schoolcraft