What is the strangest punishment you received/gave?

[TripletDaddy]

Leb's post about making his boys hold hands on the couch after a fight made me laugh.

My strangest punishment received: when I was younger, me and a friend were in my backyard goofing around. He had a ninja star and I had a pocket knife. We started throwing them into a tree in the yard. This escalated into a game to try to get the star and the knife to stick...we would back up and throw for distance, put targets up, etc...after awhile, we noticed that the items would stick better if we removed the bark. So I grabbed a shovel and basically hacked off a bunch of bark from the tree. we finished our game and had a lovely time.

Long story short....parents come home, see the tree missing a bunch of bark, and get annoyed. I think they were more annoyed that were throwing knives, actually.

Anyway...my punishment for hurting the tree? I had to sit at the base of the tree, put my legs around it, and hug it. I had to sit there hugging the tree for about 30 minutes.

They were completely serious. I thought it was dumb and made no sense.

My kids are still small, so no real stories about punishments doled out.