Christmas cards

[mellicious]

We spent Christmas evening (not Christmas Eve, but the evening of Christmas Day!) trying to teach Rob how to play cards. He had a deprived childhood in some odd ways - he was the third of four boys and I get the feeling they just ran wild in a pack most of the time when they weren't in school. He says they never played cards at all. (This has showed up in other odd ways over the years, too, like before he met me he had never been on an escalator.)

So we taught him to play Spades earlier tonight. The way my sister plays Spades is somewhat more complex (more like full-on bridge) than the way I remember playing it in the 9th-grade cafeteria, but it was still the same game, really. (Card-playing was very in for adults in the 60s & into the 70s, in general, and for some reason, for a year or two when I was in the lower grades of high school - which would have been 1973-74, maybe - it trickled down to the teenagers of our little town. Then it mostly just went away, as fads do.) Anyway, it took him a while to get the hang of it, but he was doing really well by the time we gave in for the night.

(Our parents, on the other hand, taught us to play bridge, probably even before I was in 9th grade. I think it was maybe when we were still in grade school, and it was a bit over our heads, at the time. Plus our dad had a notoriously bad temper and would yell at us - my mom included - when we messed up. Spades in the cafeteria was a lot more fun. I imagine Rob and his brothers had a pretty good time running wild, too, and didn't care how much card-playing they missed.)

Added: I failed to mention above that my brother-in-law was also there - I feel like it was wrong not to even mention his existence. Besides, without him we wouldn't have had a fourth for Spades. He grew up in Mexico City and he said his mom played bridge, too, but he didn't act like he'd played cards a great deal, either. But he didn't seem quite as ignorant of what to do as Rob was. Rob didn't even seem to know, y'know, how to hold the cards, and that you really needed to sort them into suits so you don't get confused. The basics. (I guess it says something about our life that we've been married nearly 35 years and this never really came up before.)

Comments

[fauxklore]

We mostly played gin rummy and something called casino. As young children, we played war.

[mellicious]

I don't remember ever playing gin rummy but I know people used to talk about it a lot. Casino sounds familiar. And we definitely played War.

Hmm, now that I think about it, I think my grandmother tried to teach us to play gin rummy. She was very competitive and almost always won, which really didn't make it terribly enjoyable for us. And my mom's family also played dominoes a lot.