Friday, December 24, 2010

Merry Christmas Eve

I've been a little down on Christmas this year. I think I am having some sort of mid mid life crisis, but that is another story. Anyway, it was nice to have my annual Christmas Eve festivities at my Grandparents church and our annual Chicken-N-Dumplins meal. I did feel, though, that our party could use some livening up, so I invented some new family games for tonight and tomorrow. My family refused to play most of them, so maybe someone out there can put these to good use.

1.) Family History Balderdash
My mom has been doing research on ancestory.com. She has found many many stories about our ancestors. I thought she could use those stories to make a new version of the game Balderdash. She would give us three elements of a story from our family history. For example, she might say, "Revolutionary War, Baker, George Blithly." All of the players would invent a story about our family history using these three elements and write the story on cards. My mom would write the actual story. Then, she would shuffle the cards and read them in no particular order. We would all vote on what we thought the real family story was and get points accordingly.

As an appendage, I think another version of this game could be Family Secrets Balderdash. In that game we would give three clues to an embarrassing family secret. For example, "Aunt Mae, tattoo, 1995." We all would make up stories and mix them in with the actual family secret. I really think siblings would enjoy playing this game.

2.) What Time Will People Arrive Bingo
This is a game we could play because our family all lives in town (at least the family coming to Christmas this year). Across the top of our bingo cards, we would write times we thought people would arrive. In the actual squares we would write the names of our family members. We would mark a space if a family member actually arrived at the time they were on our card. This game is challenging in my family because you would lose if you wrote down the actual times people said they would arrive.

3.) Family Survivor
In this game, we would vote our family members out of the main Christmas room.

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