Traditions That Cause A Stir

After dinner is over and the presents are open, what do you do on Christmas?

Do you take a nap? Watch TV? Start a family argument?

Our tradition is to play an ornament matching game. And yes, agruments have ensued.

The object is to match the ornament to the person it was bought for.
Winner is the person who has the most correct answers.
The prize is $20, hence the possibility of an argument.

We're greedy......and competitive ;-)

Since Mom/Grandma knows the most about what's going on with the family, she buys the ornaments.
Most years there's around 25 of us give or take (divorce, births, breakups......you never know from one year to the next).

Just to give you an example of how this works, if one of the grand kids gets his drivers license she might buy a new car ornament...or better still, a wrecked car ornament. Now that seems pretty simple and you'd think that most of us would guess who it belongs to pretty quickly, but if she buys the wrecked car ornament and one of us has had an accident in the last year, well....you get the idea. A lot of guessing and swearing is involved.

We each take a turn unwrapping an ornament and they go on display for everyone to see.

Once they're all opened she hands us a list with everyone's name on it and it's time to match the ornament to the person.

This part of the game can be pretty amusing. It's not unusual to overhear such  remarks as...

• Who plays baseball?
• Did someone get a new job?
• Hey, there's only 1 football player and 3 kids play!
• What's with the lottery ornament? DID SOMEONE WIN THE LOTTERY?????

While this is going on my mom sits in the corner with screwy smile on her face.

She loves the confusion and guessing and snarky comments we make.

These are some of my ornaments. They were pretty easy for everyone to guess.

1. The year we bought our house
2. My kids ( this one is over 20 yrs old )
3. The year I took my mom to Florida

These next ones were harder to figure out. They were bought for me but not for reasons obvious to everyone, including myself. This is where you have to try and think like my mom and that's kind of scary.

1.  I rented a snow cone machine for a party one year. She saw the ice cream cones and thought "close enough"
2. We had dinner at a retro restaurant one year, it had a juke box
3. The boot should have been for my sis but mom thought I was the one that bought a new pair of hiking boots. (That little faux pas caused quite a stir)
4. This last one was titled "Holiday Stress"  Everyone thought it was meant for them hahaha, nobody got it right but me :)

  

This was the ornament from last year.

The picture was taken on my 4th birthday. My first bike.

How cool was that?

 

It really is a lot of fun. And yes, we do have our arguments and little spats but what's a little dissension amongst family when big bucks are involved?