Heidi and John invited us over for Christmas Eve dinner. We went over, fortunately arriving only a little late, after having dashed out to purchase a set of four ramekins for them. Heidi asked if I would make souffles for dessert, not realizing she was asking me to make them for New Year's Eve, and not tonight.
She let me make souffle anyway. Who can resist chocolate souffle?
Answer: not me!
John's family has a tradition of playing pinochle on Christmas Eve. To follow in this tradition, John taught us how to play, and we played one game. The partners ended up being John and I versus Kris and Heidi.
In my true beginner card playing tradition, from which we have derived the term, to have a Kitt hand, I drew six of the eight aces in the deck. My first hand, and I managed a meld score of fifteen. Clearly I underbid when I said, "21." John had one of the other aces, so we ended up dominating the hand, setting the tone for the game. Heidi and Kris couldn't catch a break, and the game finished quickly.
Heidi jumped in next with euchre, except she didn't quite remember all of the rules. Our euchre game lasted twice as long as the pinochle game, but had far many more laughs. Heidi won the first game on her first hand by some obscure rule we think is a Grantz-Smith house rule, and we played a second game. After John and I were down by at least half in the second game, with Kris and Heidi near assured victory, we all realized the order of the cards was not J-J-A-K-Q-10 for all suits, only trump. We had played several hands wrong, and the game was started over. The evening continued this way, with various rules coming to light only after a card transgression had happened, much to the delight of John, Kris and me. At one point, we were laughing to hard that, had we had any liquids in our mouths, they were have sprayed the far kitchen walls.
We left late at night, with visions of Christmas goodies dancing in our heads, and warm fuzzies from the house and good cheer of good friends.
