148. Nightcap

With our stomachs full of Cuban food and our glasses full of our neighbor's highly flammable egg nog, Christmas dinner drew to an end. I tend to get a little depressed when Christmas ends because I look forward to it all year. The second I hear my first Christmas song of the year or get my first Tacky Christmas Sweater Party invite, my whole world seems more... magical.

OK, that sounds super lame, I'll admit, but there's just something about Christmas music and parties and egg nog and Secret Santa gift exchanges and ornaments and gingerbread lattes that add an extra bounce to my step. I knew the day after Christmas meant the twinkling lights illuminating my neighborhood would start coming down, "All I want For Christmas is You," would sound outdated, and the Precious Moments ornaments would be carefully placed back in their Styrofoam-padded boxes and tucked away for another year. OK, let's be honest, most of that doesn't actually happen until mid-January. But still, the end of Christmas dinner signaled the end of Christmas magic. So we drank.

Post-dinner drinking games had become a tradition over the years, and, well, we like to honor family traditions. So we cleared the table, poured ourselves another round of drinks (most of us switched to beer or Redbull Vodka because the flammable egg nog sounded put Four Loko to shame), and splayed the playing cards out into a perfect circle. Call it Ring of Fire, Circle of Death, Kings Cup, Waterfall, Captain Dickhead, or The Game With Too Many Names, but no matter what you call it, I call it my favorite game.

Mom and Dad and Abuela and Abuelo relocated to the living room to watch Spanish soap operas (I still think we should have made a drinking game out of that), leaving the kitchen table to me, Cayden, Meg, Corbin, Noelle, and Jay. Then, in keeping with tradition and all, our friends from high school came over: my friend Parry, Meg's friends Whitney and Jose, Corbin's friend Brandon, and later, Noelle's friends Ryan and Laura, and Parry's friend Graham. There's a reason our house is known as the "party house" in the neighborhood.

I loved reconnecting with old high school friends during the holidays because, for the most part, it was almost like we'd never left. We could go a year without talking to said friends, aside from a Facebook wall post to tell them Happy Birthday, but when we were at my parents' house, gathered around the table with our beers and playing cards, it was like we were 16 again. Only a tiny bit more mature.


(Oh, and please excuse Parry's UT shirt. BOOMER.)

My favorite part of my favorite drinking game is when someone pulls a King. The King card means you get to make a rule. I'd say the highlight of the night was when Cayden made the rule that everyone had to speak with an accent that was different from their own and Noelle tried to speak Spanish the rest of the night. Another rule: You can't say names. Another: You can't point. Another: You can't cuss. Oh, and if you cussed you had to stand like Captain Morgan until someone else cussed.

So the game would go a little like this:

Me: "Who's turn is it?"
Jose: "I think it's Parry's."
Me: (Pointing at Jose) "OH! Take one drink for answering my question because I'm the Questionmaster and take another drink for saying his name!"
Cayden: "Well then you have to drink for pointing!"
Me" "Shit."
(Everyone points at me because I cussed.)
Everyone has to drink.
I stand like Captain Morgan.

It all goes downhill from there. It was the first time Cayden had heard of the game, but he was a natural. Kind of like he was a natural at Beer Pong and Flip Cup, too. And to think he never went to college...

We played until every last drop of beer was gone (Well, except for some canned Corona that had been in our fridge since Noelle and Jay's wedding three years back that tasted like aluminum and Sharpies and one time led me to crawl around in my "I heart Quarterbacks" underpants in front of my whole family and some family friends. Yeah, we don't touch those cans anymore).

We played until the Vodka bottle ran empty.

We played until just about every drop of alcohol in my house had been consumed, aside from the egg nog. Something told me puking that would be almost as bad as the jalapeno incident. And when we were all good and buzzed, we relocated. Corbin and Noelle and Jay and their friends kept the party going at Papa Gs. Cayden and I moved our party to the bedroom.



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