Home Alone This Christmas? Here’s 10 Booby Traps That’ll Keep It That Way

By: Chris Jowett

If you’re home alone this holiday, one of two things has happened to you: your family woke up late for their flight and forgot you in the attic where they sent you for punishment the night before and now cat burglars are storming the house OR you’re helping end this pandemic and will go full apocalypto to make sure no one bursts your holiday-themed sneeze guard home bubble. Here’s 10 different ways you can keep comedic-foil burglars and sneeze-fiends from entering your domain.

1.) Bear Trap

Starting simple, yet so deadly (at least for a limb). A bear trap is a sure bet on keeping anyone out of your home. You can set one up just outside your front and back doors, cover them in leaves, grass, a sheet, or anything that wouldn’t prevent it from chomping off someone’s Covid-covered foot, and at the very least you’ve got your main entrances taken care of. If you’re someone who needs a little extra help bolstering your defenses from possible Joe Pesci-looking criminals, get a handful of these bad boys set up around your yard, in your driveway, or throughout the main stairwell of your walk-up for you cityfolk. These are recommended for external use only. Setting one up inside your own house is grounds for ground beef à la foot. Lastly, remember: if it’s good enough for a bear, then it’s good enough for Harry and Marv type motherfuckers.

2.) Swinging Paint Cans

This wholly original trap we came up with at Word Brothel is guaranteed to knock anyone trying to spend the holidays with you onto their droplet-spraying ass. Just string up the fullest, heaviest paint cans you can find to the top of a staircase and throw them down when people try to come up. At the very least this will cause some sort of skull damage to your intruders, like a simple broken nose or an entirely fractured face. But if facial injuries aren’t a goal for you when it comes to saving yourself from others this Christmas, replace the paint can with whatever object you see fit. We recommend a giant metal bar that can slam the unwelcome in the chest, sending them flying down through your main floor into the basement/crawl space (fingers crossed for a crawl space full of spiders and shit like that).

3.) Tarp Over Big-Ass Hole (I, II, and III)

I) The Messy Version

Okay, for this one you gotta be willing to let someone die gruesomely and you have to clean it up. Hey, if you’re willing to do that, then kudos to you. Your commitment to keeping social distance exceeds every sane person on the planet, but you deserve a trap that’s effective enough for your psychotic needs. It’s pretty clear that gravity does a lot of the work in this one so you just have to set it up in high trafffic spot that you won’t forget about and accidentally kill yourself like an idiot. You want more of The House That Jack Built vibes, not Se7en.

II) The Pacifist Option

Consider this trap as more of a warning/statement. Your coughing Uncle Tweedy will just fall right in and have no way of getting out but for you to save him. So this one requires some work, even if you do leave Uncy Tweed to die in there. You’ll have to mask up and confront your intruders, which for some folks out there who love to yell at the publicly unmasked couldn’t be more cathartic, OR after waiting 10-14 days for any potential COVID to run through him, you’ll have to clean up the grisly, decaying mess you’ve left in there like dishes after Christmas dinner. If you’re not up for all that clean-up and maintenance, you should go for…

III) The Big-Ass Asshole Hole

Find the biggest asshole you can, a Chad or Brayden type of guy with sandals and a visor on his head, and leave him in the hole to talk about Bitcoin and Elon Musk to whoever falls in. The intruder will be driven so nuts by that human Sarlacc Pit they’ll climb out themselves. It’s cleaner and less hands-on for you, and it gives you the best chance at skipping out on any possible COVID infection. Just make sure to get your Asshole tested regularly and keep vigorously social distancing from him just in case.

4.) Giant Rolling Boulder

The Giant Rolling Boulder technique has been a go-to booby trap for centuries. Find the biggest boulder in your county and set it up at the doorway to fall and roll towards your grandma who thought it would be a good idea to surprise you on Christmas morning. Fair warning set up can be a bit tricky. It’s best to only use natural tools, like dirt and twigs, otherwise the curse of the boulder will be brought upon you and all future generations. Your kin will suffer, so set it up right.

5.) Literally Anything From ACME

Wile E. Coyote never caught a break with ACME products, but you’re not an emaciated cartoon wolf. You’ve got a belly full of Instacart and an insatiable appetite for keeping these fucking people away from you, so you should be able to operate these gadgets with no issue. ACME lives in the vast corners of the dark web so don’t look here for a link to their website (hint: it’s hidden in Amazon, requires a keyboard combo to unlock it). When ordering from ACME, read every instruction carefully from shipment down to the moment you trigger the trap. Most of their stuff is intended for capturing prey, so take that into consideration when planning your Booby Magnum Opus.

6.) Too Many Snakes

One snake is a good pet. You can freak people out a little bit, feed it dead mice, keep it in a tank and live your life. But we all know one snake didn’t take down the Sam L. Jackson/Kenan Thompson plane, so what are we fucking around with one snake for? Get yourself way too many snakes and hide them in a place(s) where the unwanted are sure to discover them. Fill your guest toilet, that one empty drawer in your kitchen, or leave a welcoming box outside your front door like a deadbeat’s Halloween candy bowl labeled “Please Take 1” and you’ll scare off Daniel Stern better than ape tenets could ever do. Worried about feeding the snakes? Just leave ‘em in there together, eventually they’ll just eat each other.

7.) Laxative Milk & Cookies Specifically For Santa

Fauci said Santa is “immune” from COVID, but we all know mutant strains can and will find their way to that demographically at-risk elf laborer. He’s a one-man superspreader whose unavoidable bidding will be done throughout the world on December 24th. So, since he will be in your house covered in every strain of COVID imaginable, leave him laxative laced cookies to dunk in laxative milk to help stop him from continuing to superspread after your house. Think of it as a pay-it-forward style booby trap. You lax him at your place then he’s shitting his pants over Milwaukee and he just has to stop. Will you ruin Christmas? Yes. But you’ll be saving countless lives doing so. Be the sadistic Grinch we need this year.

8.) Laser Cuisinart

With this thing YOU ARE the resident evil. This heat laser system is perfect if you’ve got a hallway leading from your front door to the rest of your lonely holiday abode. Anyone who walks through that front door will be met with cool intricate blue lasers in designs too tight to be ignored. The lasers are guaranteed to slice right through anything at all, so make sure it’s off before you walk back in your house. But who are we kidding? You’re going nowhere, you king. The lasers can move up and down the hallway, cut in and out, stay perfectly still, but what they absolutely won’t do is let a single fingerless-glove wearing, no-mask motherfucker get even 39 and a half feet from you.

9.) Your Very Own Dennis The Menace

SkyMall stopped printing for the skies but continued printing for the black market. And they have little Dennis The Menace clones that will do all the work for you! Created in a lab in Moscow, Dennis will think up all the ways he can keep people away and execute those traps without any input or effort on your part. This one is for the one-percenters since it costs quite a lot and maintenance requires Tony Stark-level technology. Dennis isn’t fully AI, so no worries about him gaining consciousness and Menacing your life, but he does have all the acuity and stamina of the original rascal in order to make at least your neighbors’ life a living hell.

10.) A Rake