Forty-seven-year-old Maribel Yepes and her five friends teamed up to play a hilarious prank on their husbands as they celebrated a special Colombian holiday dedicated to uniting friends and lovers.
On the third Saturday of September every year, Colombians celebrate their annual Day of Love and Friendship. It’s a time when households around the nation gather to honor the time-tested value of “amistad,” or friendship.
And in one particular apartment in the city of Medellin, Colombia, the holiday was celebrated a little differently, but with lots of love and laughter.
Grateful to live near her friends in Medellin, Maribel works as a welfare advisor and is a mother of two. All of Maribel’s friends are over 60 and serve as vibrant proof of her belief that age is no barrier to “having fun.”
Maribel first met her friends four years ago when attending her husband’s 40th high school reunion. Today, the couples frequently go out together to celebrate birthdays, holidays, and reunions.
Earlier this year, Maribel noticed the popular “t-shirt prank” going viral on social media. Wives secretly collaborate to buy the same t-shirt for their husbands, then have the men unknowingly wear their matching shirts to a gathering.
Maribel and her friends thought it would be a great piece of mischief to pull on the Day of Love and Friendship, so they ordered identical shirts online for their husbands. After the shirts arrived at Maribel’s workplace, her friends stopped by over the course of a week to pick them up. Then, on Sept. 21—the Day of Love and Friendship—the final reveal took place.
Maribel invited her friends and their husbands to her apartment to celebrate the holiday, but only the wives were in the know.
“Each one of them was in charge of giving a shirt to their husband that day, as a gift of love and friendship,” said Maribel, who has been married for 23 years.
When the next friend arrived, Maribel’s husband again opened the door. He was surprised to see that this friend, too, had donned the same shirt.
At this point, Maribel’s husband seemed to grow a little suspicious. Was this shirt just really popular, or was he part of some secret fashion show he didn’t know about? Only the men were wearing matching shirts; the wives were dressed normally.
The wives’ laughter filled the apartment as the rest of the husbands made their debut. The good-natured men laughed along with them, especially as the prank began to take hold and the fifth and sixth men arrived.
