Holidailies Prompt

The holidays usually involves gatherings with friends and/or family. Are there any favorite games you always play at these gatherings

Of course my family played games at Christmas- I think one year we played dominos.

I don’t know who thought it would be more fun to set them up in patterns  and knock them over, but I’m pretty sure nobody knew how to play them anyway.

If they did, they weren’t sharing that info.

We also played checkers

 We’d cheat like crazy and it was fun. In fact if you didn’t cheat and make it amusing nobody wanted to play you. I mean, come on it was checkers- not high stakes Poker.

But by far we loved a game I actually got for my birthday when I was six.

I’m not sure whose idea it was to get it for me, but I think I asked for one and said it would help me learn my spelling.

Yes.

We played with my Ouija board.

Now before we jump off the tracks and talk about it being evil and opening doors to Hell, I should say we all went into locked and loaded and ready to have some fun with each other.

We’d ask questions about dead people who never existed, I asked where I had lost my car keys ( I was six years old at the time ) amd I got an answer, we also asked who the witches in the family were ( and in our family witch  was slang for being mean  o that meant most of us were accused of being witches ) and I think one year we asked the spirits to give us a sign by making the phone ring.

Which sad to say they  did not, but the doorbell rang and it was a cab driver who showed up at the wrong house.

The hard part was sliding the planchette ( I’ve heard it refered to as a mouse…I kid you not) around and not being obvious about it. My Aunt was good at it- I wasn’t. But I knew if I asked weird questions everyone would laugh and I could slide that thing around the board like an out of control ice skater.

Later on, when I had kids of my own we played Nintendo games at Christmas- Zelda was the house favorite.

I wasn’t into it but my sons and nephews had fun so that was ok.

But after watching that little green elf run around looking for heart containers I’d start thinking about the fun I had at their age- and I’m sorry they missed out on that.

I guess I could have busted out the board games, the dominos the Ouija board- but maybe what made those games fun were the personalities that sat around the table at that time.

It wouldn’t have been the same without my Aunt and Grandpa who were the best at egging me on and encouraged me to jump out of the box and let my imagination run riot when we played those games.

All in all, it was a great memory from the past and I’m glad it’s there for me to reflect on all of these years later.