College Student Hires Fake Family for Christmas Card Prank

The card reads reads “Season’s Greetings from the Brassows. Josh & Patty “Bone-Crusher” Johnson, and the boys Blade & Thor.”

Josh Brassow has wanted to pull a Christmas prank on his family for years, and this year, he finally did it.

Brassow, a 25-year-old student at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan, posted an ad online saying he wanted to “confuse” his distant relatives with a Christmas card that makes it look like he “married some random woman with kids.”

“It will be an awkward photo for sure with lots of turtle necks and ugly clothes. I want to baffle my aunts, uncles and especially my grandparents,” the post read.

TLDR; ; Student wants to play a prank on his real family with a fake family for the holidays

Sure enough, Brassow said a woman, who has a number of tattoos and piercings and is nearly twice his age, responded to his ad saying she and her two sons would take pictures with him.

“The shock factor was there but really the determining factor in choosing her was just the enthusiasm,” Brassow said. “She was just a great sport about it.”

The pair completed the card and within one day Brassow had 100 cards printed out.

The card features three images of Brassow, a woman and two younger boys. It reads “Season’s Greetings from the Brassows. Josh & Patty “Bone-Crusher” Johnson, and the boys Blade & Thor.”

The prank quickly went viral, garnering more than 1.1 million views on imgur.

“It just blew up and the next week I’d wake up and people would tell me this has been shared all over the place,” he said, adding that he created a Kickstarter campaign to help get cards to anyone who may want them.

While many of his family members saw the image after it went viral, Brassow hopes he can still fool his grandparents.

“They’re the last ones, if anybody hasn’t seen it,” he said.

But the image has been a source of comedy for the Brassow family, even if he didn’t get to fool many of them.

“[My dad] started laughing so hard his face turned red, he had tears in his eyes,” Brassow said.  

Contact Us