Thanks to Boing Boing once again, I found this gallery of paintings of sock puppets.
My family has a history of communicating only through puppets, dolls and stuffed animals. In our youth, my brother and I commanded a harem of stuffed animals, one of which was a bear named Big Mama. In our own creation myth, Big Mama somehow birthed the whole menagerie, from orange colored clowns, to purple bears, to Garfield, to an anthropormorphized feather pillow named Smitty. I don't want to think about the psychological implications of why my brother and I were both "married" to Big Mama, especially given the fact that we were from a single parent household.
Our mother expressed her latent hatred for children by talking to us via a dimpled-chinned doll named Pete-E. On family vacations, whenever we passed by a McDonald's, Pete-E would scream vehemently, "McDonald's! McDonalds!" thus assuring that both my brother and I would grow up to be childless vegetarians.
Pete-E would fill out a foursome in our family Scrabble games. He won once. I was so embarrassed that I began to research Scrabble in earnest, memorizing the complete list of acceptable two-letter words. I trained for hours on a computer version of the game, eventually beating the computer. My resulting competiveness pushed my mother away from the game forever.
Later, after my mother remarried, a puppet pig named Owen adopted my step-father's deep voice and manly habits: such as weekend narcolepsy, fondness for burping, and the conservative principles of talk radio.
When I moved away, I rarely thought of these other characters that made up our imagined extended family. But many years later they made quite an impression on my wife when I took her home to meet "the family". "Owen's from a planet called Pigmania. That's why he's so wierd," I tried to explain to her.
My wife sent my brother a monkey puppet for Christmas. My brother replied, "I've named the monkey Stobierski, from a list of unusual names I collect off spam mail before I delete them."
Welcome to the family, Stobierski.