Appeasement

"And so, in order to appease the snow gods and get them to bless us with a good season, we have presented this twinkie sacrifice."

There was no end to the humor that was in the air. I had no idea how it had started, but it had apparently been a tradition for some years to burn a collection of twinkies during the Christmas celebration so that the rest of the snow season would be good. Being surrounded by skiers and snowboarders, to say nothing of the fact that a good snow season would be good for the company, made it pretty obvious that the more snow there was, the better. No one took the sacrifice seriously - it was just a fun thing to do, and a good story to tell.

We had spent a good amount of time taping six boxes worth of twinkies to a mannequin torso, completely covering it as best as we could. Someone had even crafted a head for the mannequin out of foam and paper bags - though it's neck was far too long, which resulted in several jokes about it being ET, and having a twinkie instead of his finger as he talked about phoning home. We'd even gone to the effort of drilling holes into the mannequin - one so that we could attach the head, and a few others so that we could fill its interior with flammables. We didn't just want to set the outside on fire. Doing so would simply melt the tape, leading it to fall apart.

It was a couple hours before we actually made the sacrifice, though. There had been a lot of anticipation throughout the night for what was to come of the sacrifice, especially because many of us were new and had never seen this before. We had no idea what to expect.

They filled the mannequin partially with lighter fluid, letting it drip out of the bottom and onto the ground, where they had made a trail of the lighter fluid so that it could be lit like a wick. I don't think there wasn't anyone who wasn't terrified for what would happen as the lighter was put to the fluid - the fire traveled quickly, but the mannequin was placed on a stand, and the dripping of the lighter fluid wasn't enough for the flames to travel up and light the sacrifice. We laughed as one man grabbed another container of lighter fluid and head over.

We weren't ready.

When the fire caught, it shot up into the mannequin. The lighter fluid inside ignited instantaneously. The expansion of air as the fire exploded outwards tore apart the holds of the mannequin with ease, and a bang ripped through our eardrums as our sacrifice was torn asunder.

We couldn't have asked for a better result.