The Family

Well – let us hope & plan for having a Christmas party.

I’ll host and make the ridiculous games.

Chris will coordinate the food – bring the main dish & coordinate with the rest of us on what to bring (Chris, can you link your Apple Note lists here? that would be convenient.)

Mom will do the gifting details – drawing of names. And I understand that this year we’ll all give the kids, there will be names drawn for an exchange, and we’ll have an family exchange too. I like!

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The 2-item exchange game this year is called Monsters and Aliens.

You see, this year has been a rough one, with all kinds of monsters (microbes … politicians … etc.). And if there were ever a year that aliens would land, this would be it. We’d probably all just say, sure, pile it on.

So let us assume that you may be called up, at any moment, to face these perils. To fight off the monster or the alien. Well – how should you be prepared? We all know that you need garlic for vampires and tin foil to fend off the greys … but what else? What if you are facing a bunyip? Or a flying brain spore?

So that is your task – bring something that you could use to defend yourself (or at least survive the encounter) if you met a monster (defined as originating on Earth) or an antagonistic alien (defined as originating anywhere else). For the sake of argument, we’re just worried about the antagonistic aliens. No friends here!

Be prepared to explain your item – what monster or alien it is effective against, and how to use it. It will be convenient if you wrap your monster item in green and your alien item in red, if you can find red or green wrapping paper at this time of year. But failing that, just label them however you’d like.

And since we can’t raise the monster or alien’s suspicions about what we’re doing, these items all must come from a grocery store (loosely defined as HEB, Target, Walmart … anywhere you can buy milk). And let’s put a loose $10 cap on each item.

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And another note.

It would be so good, so good for my mental health at least (I assume for everyone else’s as well) to get together and have fun. But it’s certainly not worth dying for.

I have figured out how to adapt most of my games to a virtual setting if we need to. So let’s touch base before hand – when would be good? I’m thinking the weekend before, say the 18th or so. Would that be enough time to pivot on the food if necessary?

And if we look mournfully at each other on the 18th and say, no, the winter surge is as apocalyptic as the doomsayers said, then I will pack up party boxes and shuttle them (and the gifts we have for each other) about that weekend. So be sure to have all your gifts in place by that weekend just in case.

And then we will have a zoom call, and we will have music and decorate cookies and play silly games and have fun anyway.