Tradition

So it’s been a while. Life has been a whirlwind the last month and I finally have a second to sit down and blog. We jumped in the car and drove through to Iowa in the middle of December, just to make it in time for the Fenchel (my mom’s) Family Christmas. You often think of family Christmas traditions consisting of sweet lovable memories….for our family tradition we play spoons.

For those of you unfamiliar with the game, it’s simple, you place one less kitchen spoon than you have players and then when someone reaches four of a kind, the one without a spoon loses. So really it has nothing to do with winning, you just don’t want to be the loser. Most families stop there, a simple enjoyable card game. But here, spoons is a table breaking, arm biting, someone’s sleeping on the couch tonight because they ripped a spoon from their wife’s death-life clutch kind of game. The punishment for losing has changed through the generations, but there is always a punishment. The traditional punishment is the loser has to wear a clothespin on their ear or place their finger in a mouse trap for one round. Our generation is still found of the clothes pins, but thinks the mousetrap is a bit asinine (we like our phalanges).

We use to place a metal bowl or strainer over the losers head and then everyone would whack the metal object with a metal spoon (brings a new definition to ringing of the ears), but then lots of good pots and strainers were losing their shape from all the abuse and thus their cooking quality declined. From time to time people ran through the snow drifts of town half clothed singing Christmas carols or other freakish acts.

But this year was our year. The older generation has retired their spoons and has taken up coaching the youth. We decided since we were all young (and we couldn’t afford to break another antique oak table) we would play on the floor. The tournament started, everyone hunched together eyeing their spoon of choice. At one point I thought I had a broken hand. I saw my cousin bite into the arm of her college wrestling boyfriend (now fiancé) and almost draw blood…we marry too nice of boys. But Jared has learned to fight and we ended up in the finals and I won the tournament. Yes, the pregnant women whooped up, but then I am the oldest cousin and have years of spoons experience.

Anyway it was great to see the family, everyone made it to Christmas.

As for our Christmas at the Fenton household we had a great time. Erin got spoiled rotten, I think mom and dad bought every Dora item they walked by. She got Dora the bathtub doll, Dora slippers; Santa even brought her a red electric Dora Volkswagen Beetle. She really got into Christmas this year. Max got a bad eye infection when we were home, which was pretty sucky for him, but at the same time he couldn’t go to work so we got to hang out.

Dad bought us a .17cal HMR revolver to keep us safe in our hood. We went out for target practice one morning to try it out and it’s really a sweet little gun. Mom bought us a toaster oven which I love and we got some new Osborn pottery for the kitchen.

Sorry no photos yet, my camera was still in the shop and mom need to send me her. I will post some later.