Plain silliness
I know I must have lots of family codes and rituals as we're a lunatic bunch, but the only ones that spring to mind right now are these:

My father and my husband are both fairly technically minded. At least, my husband is, my dad tries to be. So inevitably a family visit will wind up up with the two of them talking wireless routers, visual basic, and how many megs of ram they've got or some such. As soon as they get into sentences that are complete gibberish, conversation is struck up between me, my mother and my sisters along the lines of:
'So you took the purple one?'
'Yeah, I've found purple is so much better than pink with yellow stripes. You get more squiggles per floop for it.'
'Have you tried one of the latest banana flanges?'
and so forth. The trick is to keep a straight face and keep the utter nonsense going until it distracts dad & Mr Trellis and they lose the track of their conversation. Record I think has been 20 minutes.

The second is down to a love of Blackadder. A favourite episode is 'Beer' featuring Miriam Margolyes as Lady Whiteadder. At one point she utters the glorious line 'I will suffer comfort this once. We shall just have to stick forks in our legs between courses.' One day while on holiday we were having the usual argument on what to do that day. A suggestion was made that was met with little enthusiasm, so I said 'or we could just stick forks in our legs'. Cue my mother nearly dying of laughter (she's easy to please my mum) and the birth of a catchphrase: ANYTHING that is a crap idea is now met with the fork alternative.

The last is down to my mother's musical tastes. The radio is invariably tuned to Classic FM and from time to time a bit of opera will come on. We CANNOT listen to it without providing our own translation. For example: Puccini's O Mio Babbino Caro from Gianni Schicchi roughly translates as 'Oh my beloved carrot, I'm going to the port for a lemon competition'. La Donna e Mobile from Verdi's Rigoletto runs along the lines of 'My puma has wind, he has a funny accent and a pension. Sometimes he's an ambulance that needs a visa, then a piano, then some rice that's menstruating.' That's Italians for you.
(Mrs Trellis GIN, Wed 26 Nov 2008, 16:11, 2 replies)

yoink!
Classic stuff - I'm *so* stealing the forks line. clicked!
(The Incredible Sulk Finally remembered his password on, Wed 26 Nov 2008, 16:55, closed)

O Fortuna
is actually a wife giving her husband a shopping list. I transcribed it once, but can't find it now.

She gets a bit stroppy with him, following the traditional wifely assumption that he will forget some vital item such as sausages or frozen peas.

Trufax.
( warmfuzzies Isn't here, Wed 26 Nov 2008, 17:25, closed)