Tag: Mad Libs

Some Christmas Memories

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I want to share some personal Christmas memories with you, in hope that they’ll inspire equally fond memories of yours.

*Grammie, in her 90s, effortlessly kneeling on the floor to open presents, and just as effortlessly rising up again. Man, did she have healthy knees!

*Sitting in Uncle Bernie’s lap as he read me A Christmas Carol. He didn’t have much lap room, but I was just a little child at the time. He had enough room for me.

*My father setting up and decorating the tree on Christmas Eve, after packing us kids off to bed. He always did the whole job in one night. No matter how early I came downstairs on Christmas Day, everything was there.

*Aunt Millie donning a Santa Claus mask to give out presents.

*The whole family, over a dozen of us crammed into Grandpa’s tiny living room, laughing uproariously as we played Mad Libs.

*Playing our new Clue game with my cousins, Joanne and Christopher, under their family’s Christmas tree.

I could go on and on, but you get the point by now.

Merry Christmas, everyone–and may this year’s Christmas spirit work for us all throughout the coming year.

Let’s Have a Porch Party

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The weather’s getting nice–what say we have a back porch party? We haven’t gotten together since Christmas. All right, I just remembered I had a birthday party a couple of weeks ago. But who says you can have too many parties?

Granted, my back porch is an imaginary back porch; but sometimes that’s the best kind. You never run out of room, and the imaginary caterer never runs out of goodies. Plus you can bring imaginary treats of your own.

So we’ll have cake, cold cuts, hot dogs and grilled hamburgers,cigars, beer, soda, and some of that golden wine from Durmurot. We’ll sing, swap stories and jokes, and play board games–Monopoly, Clue, we’ve got ’em all–and horseshoes and tetherball for those who feel frisky. And Mad Libs!

You’re all invited, and I’ve also invited Norbert and the singing cockatiel. Robbie and Peep will be there, if I can coax them out from under the bed: they’re shy. And don’t worry about the weather: we have a limitless supply of imaginary weather.

Come one, come all–and you can leave the face masks behind.

Memory Lane: A Mad Libs Christmas Party

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Mad Libs – The World's Greatest Word Game

I don’t know why, but this happy memory washed over me this morning.

Family Christmas party, years ago, everybody still alive and healthy, the whole bunch of us crammed into Grandpa’s living room–to this day I don’t know how we fit. And just for the heck of it, we played some Mad Libs.

If you’ve never played this crazy game, well, it’s easy. You have a short story full of blanks, and the only thing the players know is vague clues to help them choose a word to go into the blank–like “noun,” “adjective,” “exclamation,” etc. All they do is supply a word for each blank.

And so you wind up with sentences like “Mikey hiccuped all the way to the moron‘s office and then asked to shame the bloated but still prehensile senator.”

The story I read to my family at the party was about bird-watching, but by the rules of Mad Libs, they didn’t know that. I asked for nouns and adjectives and other details, and they provided them.

That’s how we wound up with a “ruling junta” in Baltimore pursuing a “yellow-bellied crotch sucker.” And other equally silly formulae.

And oh, did everybody laugh! I thought my mother was going to plotz. We laughed till tears ran down our cheeks.

I wish I could invite some of you over for Mad Libs. I could guarantee a good time!