A Merry Little Christmas

I had a great Christmas with my family, made even better by the fact that Penn was here with us so we could spend our first Christmas together.

We started a new family tradition: everyone put a dollar in a pool and placed bets on how many times Grandpa would say "whore" or some variation of "f*#k" while he was over here for Christmas dinner. So I spent the whole afternoon and evening with a notepad surreptitiously tallying every time Gramps said one or the other (and marking double points for the one time he referred to someone as an effin' whore and got both in one sentence!). The results were thrown off slightly by the fact that we spent the first hour he was here watching Curb Your Enthusiasum so he lost quite a bit of cussing time. Still, by the end of the night I'd tallied up 33 variations of the f-word and 10 "whores," which meant Dad won the bet with his guess of 45. Our plan is to not tell Grandpa about this game so we can continue to play at family gatherings from now on, because I'm pretty sure 45 will be nowhere near his record.

I'm thinking this game could be a big hit at the wedding rehearsal dinner. We'll make a big pool of all the guests and get a cousin to tally Grandpa's cursing as well as other family habits, like how many time's Penn's mother raises her eyebrows in shock/judgment (perhaps this will directly correlate to how many times Grandpa calls someone a whore), how many times my Dad says "sittin' there" when telling a story, etc. Start thinking of traits to add to the list of things to bet on, I think this is a brilliant iea.