When my husband and I got married, we told each other that we would be the kind of people who always had a kid-friendly New Year's Eve. Neither one of us was the kind of person who enjoyed drunken hijinks, especially since the hijinks tend to come with the headache, the vomiting and the sense of nameless dread the following day. We prefer to digest all our party snacks the old-fashioned way.
This is where Beth and Julie come in. Beth is in the green and Julie is to her left. I, of course, am in the foreground of the photo, a place where I do not like to be, although I am somehow mercifully hidden by a large and festive pillar candle.
Beth is one of my oldest friends. We have known each other since grade school, but became particularly close when we were in college and she was studying to be a nurse and I was studying to be a teacher. Julie is her sister-in-law and we all went to the same high school, although Julie was a cheerleader and of stellar popularity and I hung out with the smart kids and sat home on Saturday nights embroidering my monogram on damask napkins for my hope chest.
Every New Year's Eve for the past thousand years, Beth and her husband, Jim (Julie's older brother), host a euchre tournament. If you're from Indiana, Michigan or Wisconsin, you understand the concept of "euchre," but if you aren't -- it's a card game, extraordinarily complicated and governed by a set of rules that couldn't be sorted out by the Geneva Convention. Conflicting protocols, such as whether the first jack or the person sitting to the north is the dealer are matters of quarrelsome debate. I stay out of it and try doggedly to remember not to trump my partner's ace.
My husband makes it a point to try to win the prize for the most points; I always aim for the booby prize. And you know what? I usually get it.
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1 comment:
Euchre is like the Indiana state card game or something...never played it until I moved here and then kept thinking it was so dumb. LOL. You get so few cards. You get such a small amount of time to do anything with them. Bing Bam it's over. I don't get the attraction. I come from bridge playing country (what else do you do on long winter nights?) and to me that is "Cards" -- Euchre is something else. But I am the minority here, my voice is not heard, my ideas are scoffed at, and at least with Euchre you can chat a lot and snack!
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