What a tumbling Christmas!

Hello, everyone! :D How was your Christmas? Mine was filled with food and fun. It began with food and ended in lots of fun. Let me show you.

Here's the table heavily laden with all kinds of scrumptious goodies, from the must-have Christmas turey that was perfectly succulent to giant platters of salmon sashimi. There was huge bowl of mashed potatoes that The Flyer made from scratch. It was superb. There was a huge bowl of sweet, juicy cherries. There were numerous plates of jelly made my darling Grandma. There were two Christmas log cakes (chocolate and durian flavour) and one towering chocolate cream puff tree.

Food was literally spilling off the sides of the table and my kitchen console. There was just so much of it!

"Eat! Eat!" and "Take more!" were bouncing off the walls and echoing all throughout the house as the family helped themselves to the food.

Notice the balloons and streamers? They were puffed up and hung up by The Flyer.

After dinner came the games. We played Tumbling Blocks, it's pretty much the same as Jenga, except that The Flyer and I customised it a bit by writing our own penalties on each block. Whoever knocks down the tower will have to pick a block and perform the penalty written on it. So, of course, everyone was doing their darnest not to bring the tower tumbling down.

You can tell from the intensity on our faces that it wasn't as easy as just pulling a block out from below and stacking it on top.

"Which block should I move?"
"Not that one."
"I'll try this one... No, it's tight. What about this?"
"Whoah! It's wobbling! CAREFUL!!!"

This is my Granddad staring down the tower. I guess he can't believe how The Flyer and I have left it standing on pretty much just one block -- a lousy foundation for any sort of structure. So he stares and stares and stares...

... Then he makes his move... slowly... carefully... he pulls out a block. In his great relief and joy, he slaps on the block too roughly at the top of the tower and it collapses! Uh-oh... now he has to perform a penalty. He chooses a block and reads the words on it. It says, "Vibrate like a washing machine" and my Grandfather gamely quivers on his tooshie.

As the game went on, some of the other penalties that had to be performed were...

1) My Mum had to make the sound of a blue tack being stretched
2) The Flyer had to do an infomercial selling a ruler as a backscratcher
3) My Aunt had to be a smurf for 30 seconds
4) My other Aunt had to be a salesman selling a support pillow
5) My Mum again had to walk around the group like a duck

And they each performed their penalties very sportingly indeed. :D A big applause for all of them!

During the game, when my boyfriend pulled out a particularly tricky block, he turned it over to read the penalty written on it. It said, "Do an impression of Michael Jackson." My boyfriend mopped his brow and said, "Oh boy, I better not knock this down. This impression will be hard to do. Because first I will need to find a little boy to chase."

The rest of us were just grateful that we didn't bring the tower down because there were lots of other penalties just waiting to be performed, like walk like an Egyptian, dance a jig for 30 seconds, do an impression of Bill Clinton, make the sound of crickets, make the sound of a waterfall, etc.

Of course, there were easy penalties like crack your knuckles and sing a Beatles song. Then there were also blank blocks (meaning you escape with doing nothing), SOS blocks (you can use it to escape doing your penalty at any time) and Sabo blocks (you pass on your penalty to the person seated on your left or right).

After the games, it was time to open all our prezzies. That was nice. By then, it was almost 3am and everyone began to leave with yawns and sleepy eyes.

I hope your Christmas was just as fun. Do tell me all about YOUR Christmas! :)

~5-Cat Style