The Home Back Command has changed the ominous rocket alert in Gaza border communities to the music of Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker.
 Extensive research revealed that residents of the South had become desensitized to the alarming siren, but that the soothing music of the famed classical ballet piece was so jarring, it forced them out of their complacency.
“Now, I can do bourrée steps straight to the bomb shelter, which is a great distraction from what feels like impending doom,” said Sderot resident Si Ting Duck.
The original choreographer of the ballet, Marius Petipa, said he wanted Sugar Plum Fairy to sound like “drops of water shooting from a fountain.” According to a Home Back Command spokesman, the army couldn’t resist the irony of choosing a “tasteful alternative to drops of rockets shooting from Gaza.”
 “When I first heard the music, I yelled at my neighbors to turn it down,” said Igor Medyved, a former dancer at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, and currently a lettuce grower at Kibbutz Erez. “But when I realized it was the rocket alert, it sounded just like home. And the whistling sound of the rockets overhead fit perfectly with the tune.”
Home Back Command officials revealed that they would next be testing a siren blasting AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long.”