Going Flat after Christmas dinner, Play Games

Posted by dodo

One of the best ways to stop things going flat after Christmas dinner is to play games. If you have teenage children from different families staying, who don’t know each other well, break the ice after supper on Christmas Eve by playing Consequences, which invariably gets lewder and lewder, followed by Charades.

I prefer the old-fashioned Charades in which everyone divides into two teams and raids Granny’s dressing-up box in the attic — later poor Granny has to put everything back. Each team then privately selects a double-syllable word — ‘wrapping’, perhaps — and acts out three short sketches. During the first sketch someone has to, at some time, say the first syllable as in the sentence: ‘Wrap up warmly’. In the second sketch, they work in the word ping, perhaps: ‘Her bra went ping.’ In the final sketch one of the actors works the whole word, ‘wrapping’, into a speech. The other side then has to guess the word. There are always arguments and dictionary consultations because some smart alec claims that ‘ping’ isn’t a real word.

Another even better ice-breaker is Russian Charades. Again you have two sides. One goes out. The other side stays in the room and thinks up a subject — ‘Miss World’ perhaps — which is told to the first person from the other side who comes in. He or she then has to bring in the second person from the other side and silently act out ‘Miss World’ to them. The second person then gets the third person in and silently acts out what he or she saw, usually with fearful hamming up and exaggeration — and so on, until the last person outside is brought in and has to guess the original subject; invariably they guess something completely different like Esther Rantzen giving birth.

More popular today but less fun is modern Charades, or The Game, as played in the television programme, Give Us a Clue, in which people have to guess the title of a book, a film or a play and where everyone gets frightfully competitive. One host was so anxious to win one year that he didn’t even notice that his exhausted wife had fallen asleep on the floor in front of the fire, and a fallen log was singeing her hair. There are always a healthy number of young smartypants all too keen to catch you out with The Persecution and Assassination of Jean Paul Moral as performed by the Inmates of the Charenton Asylum Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.

A friend remembers staying in a large country house where one of the guests was a strange young man who had repeatedly tried to burn down his parents’ stately home. The host, a great leg-puller, kept trying to feed in subjects like Towering Inferno, Fire Down Below and The Matchmaker. His brother-in- law, on the other hand, a celebrated homosexual, was given the eleven-word song, ‘She wore an itsy-witsy, teeny-weeny, yellow poker-dot bikini,’ and flounced out in a huff.

I remember an ex-starlet trying to interpret California Suite. After several dramatic entrances into the drawing-room (where we were all sitting, mystified) to indicate the word `suite’ with grandiose gestures, she swept out again, muttering, `You lot wouldn’t recognise good acting if it sat on your face,’ never to return.

On the other hand, my eighty-year-old mother’s enactment of a caterpillar on the floor is affectionately remembered by all her grandchildren as a ‘new side‘ to Granny.

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