Florida Christmas Games - 2021-12-20

Merry Christmas! There's so many of us here in Florida that we all decided to celebrate Christmas together. And sure we could have bought a bunch of gifts for each other, but that's a lot of people to get presents for, and then you've got to transport them. It's a lot of work! But there's one thing that everybody likes. Money!

And sure, you could just put money into a card and pass it out, but there's better ways to earn money. Games! Why not spend the day competing against each other in games of skill and games of chance to win your Christmas present? Each family came up with 3 unique games and we had a lot of laughs playing together all day. 

Our first game of the day was a balloon dart toss. Rita and Tyler spent the morning blowing up balloons and filling them with cash. Pinning them to the board was the tricky part. They kept wanting to fall off!

I'll have video at the bottom of the post with many of the events. 

Grandpa had the most unique throw. As a bowler (who has bowled a 300 before) he went with an underhand throw to nail those balloons. 

Amy and Donald's first game involved wine glasses filled to the brim with water and the cheapest toilet paper money can buy. The goal is to pull the glass to your side as fast as you can, but watch out! If the water spills even a little, the paper will rip and you'll have to go dry everything up and restart. 

There were some pretty good competitions. The girls seemed to have much better luck, or more patience, than the boys. I think Tyler was the only winner amongst the boys. 

For Theresa and my first game, we're pulling out the BINGO cards. Not only did we play regular bingo, but also postage stamp, Bs and Os, and Blackout. 

Abby ended up being especially lucky. 

So many people were making comments that "I haven't even got a single number yet" that we even played a game of "Biggest Loser". Everyone played a normal game of bingo like usual, but if they actually got a BINGO then they were out. The last person to not have BINGO was the biggest loser and won money. 

As a fun bonus, we had a raffle where everyone put their name in a hat, and I drew it out for them to win $10. The first name I pulled out was "Chi!" And the second time I drew a name, it was "Chi" again! People around the table were starting to suspect a conspiracy, so I was pretty relieved when the third time I pulled Tyler's name out of the hat.  

For our next game, we needed to partner up. Everyone got 2 minutes to catch as many marshmallows in their mouth as they could. The total number you catch are compared to everyone else, and the payouts are from highest to lowest. 

Grandpa has had plenty of practice, catching popcorn in his mouth. He eats it every day!

Austin was a machine! I think out of the entire bag of marshmallows (about 35) he only missed 3! 

It helps to have a big mouth and small teeth!

I'm a pretty consistent thrower, and Theresa did a good job catching. Except when she got so tickled that she was bent over laughing for a solid 30 seconds! 

Donald was pretty good at opening that mouth wide! In the end, Austin took first place, but Donald/Amy and Ethan/Payton tied. It went to sudden death. 20 seconds and 10 marshmallows. 20 seconds goes pretty fast, but Ethan/Payton pulled it off. 

The floor was something else. 

For our next game, Amy and Donald had us go outside and line up based on our birth day. 1-10s go to the far right, 11-20s in the middle, and 20+ on the right. That'll make it pretty random. Then we were grouped into 3 teams. Everyone was given a sheet of paper and 60 seconds to make our best paper airplane. The team with the farthest plane would win a 15 second head start for your team. Luckily Austin pulled out the win and my team got the bonus!

Next, everyone was given a bowl that was filled with lego pieces embedded in a block of ice! Each team had 5 minutes to do their best to assemble it, and other teams were allowed to distract, but not interfere. 

With our 15 second head start, we sprinted into the house and locked the front door behind us. Ian would later complain that that was cheating, but I stick by my strategy. We then locked ourselves in a bathroom, using the sink and the water to melt everything. Five minutes goes by pretty quickly when you're trying to fit tiny pieces together. 

Theresa's team also ran to the bathroom (once they got inside the house). 

The hot tub in the backyard was also helpful in melting things quick. 

Great job teams!

In the end, Donald and Amy voted on which team assembled it the most correctly. Donald said it was subjective, so any decision he makes was automatically correct. In the end, my team won and took the top prize!

It's been a busy morning, but now it's time to take a break to eat lunch. Since 8am, I've had 9 racks of ribs slow-cooking in the oven. 

Ribs are great for feeding a lot of people something tasty. 

That is a good looking plate. Notice the green beans? Yes, I eat green stuff sometimes. 

For our next game, Theresa is making everyone play Skunk. What is Skunk? Each person gets 2 dice. They roll and try to get as close to 12 as possible each round. The goal is to earn 100 points total, but there's a catch. Each turn, you can roll as many times as you want to get close to 12, but if you roll 1-2 you get 0 for the round and your turn is over. If you roll a 1-1 (snake-eyes) at any time you lose all the points you've accumulated so far! Top 7 people win money, but everyone else gets nothing. 

We learned a lot about how much risk people are willing to take. In total it only took 10 rounds of rolls for someone to reach 100. Some people were super unlucky, like Ethan who roll 1-2 on 5 separate occasions, Carson who rolled snake-eyes twice, and Rita who was in the lead with 79 points until snake-eyes took her out. Theresa does like to inflict a little bit of pain in the games she leads. 

Ultimately Austin was the big winner. 

Time for our final 3 games and time to partner up again. It's another timed race. This time everyone has a piece of raw spaghetti and a plate of penne. 

The goal is to transfer 6 pieces of rigatoni from one side of the room to the other. 

Glasses. That's smart. 

The quick teams were the ones that transferred multiple pieces at the same time. Jared and Aubrey won the day by transferring all 6 pieces in 53 seconds. 

Donald and Amy's final game has us rolling a ping-pong ball across a glass table and into a bag. Each bag is worth a different dollar amount, but there's additional complications. For some reason, these ping-pong balls seem to be weighted on one side, so they don't roll straight. Couple that with a ceiling fan that is going full speed above the table and it took a pretty easy game and cranked up the difficulty. 

For our final game, Theresa and I took the saran wrap game and dialed up the difficulty. Instead of one roll of plastic wrap, we used 3.5 rolls of 200 feet each! My family rolled it up and it took about an hour! We were a little mean, doing lots of stops and starts, and having runs where there were no prizes at all.  

To further complicate matters, you had to wear oven mitts while trying to unwrap it, and you had to keep the ball on the table with one hand touching it at all times. The person to your left is trying to roll doubles with a pair of dice and then it will be their turn. We made sure to split up the couples so as to not have any people intentionally delay their turn, giving their partner more time. I think if we do it again, we'll implement another rule that it's actually the 2nd person from your left that is rolling the dice. We had people roll slowly while someone was trying to find an end, and then speed up once it was found.  

There were so many times when someone would finally get their turn, and as soon as they started, someone would roll doubles on their very first try. It seemed to happen to Tyler more often than most and it was hilarious. You know how time flies when you're having fun? It took an hour to get through the entire ball! Afterwards we traded all of our prizes we won for things we might like better. 

The promised video with clips from many of our games. It's been a long day, but we've had a whole lot of laughs together and it's been a blast.