My Darling B and I traveled to the fair metropolis of Dodgeville to spend Christmas eve with Auntie Soup and Uncle Jim and family. Well, really we ate Christmas eve with them. Seriously, I haven’t eaten that much in many moons. We noshed on crackers and sausage and cheese, we sampled cookies and cakes and fudge, we had a big, wonderful dinner of roast beef and mashed potatoes. And still, after all that, Susan tried to tempt us with the last of the pecan sandies. When I woke this morning and waddled to the kitchen to make the daily pot o’ joe, I still felt stuffed as a Thanksgiving turkey.

The highlight of the evening – well, there were many highlights, but to cap the evening off, we played The Game, a gift exchange that Jim prepped us for by asking us to bring four or five gifts each; they could be gag gifts; they all had to be inexpensive. My Darling B went to the mall one day when she got off work and grabbed the first dozen silly things she saw.

I thought we brought a pretty good haul to The Game, but I should have known better than to believe I could out-do Auntie Soup. When it was time to play, she went to her bedroom and returned to the table with a laundry basket piled high with wrapped gifts, and after she unloaded the basket, she went back to her bedroom and returned with another pile of gifts. And another. And another. I don’t know how many gifts she brought out, but by the time she was finished, their dining room table was heaped with them. “I get a little carried away,” she explained. Yeah, Auntie Soup, sort of.

We rolled dice to pick gifts; whoever got doubles got a gift, and when they were all gone then whoever got doubles could steal a gift from someone else. We did three or four rounds of stealing gifts before we opened them, and then the trading began. I think Jim liked the trading most of all, giving up what I thought was some pretty sweet swag in exchange for several cans of soup. We went home with lots of snack food: Cheetos, Chips Ahoy, chocolates and bags and buckets of popcorn, just what we needed!