Family Life

We hosted a Valentine’s Dinner at church tonight. We’d planned it, sent out invitations, decided on the menu, assigned tasks, shopped for groceries. Replies trickled in during the week, and yesterday it looked like we’d have a small group. Only a dozen or so guests. We’d planned for more and shopped accordingly. Oh well. There would be a lot of food left over. By this afternoon the numbers had swelled to about 40 guests. Now we were worried about running out of food. Would there be enough?

I didn’t have to do much–pick up some bread along the way, prepare some games, and MC the evening. The bread was easy. MCing was easy–just wing it. Preparing games was a little more challenging, specifically finding the time to prepare. I finally set aside an hour this afternoon as my deadline was fast approaching, and went looking on the internet. One of the first hits was a web site in Kazakhstan with 199 party games. Written in English, but with many drawn-out descriptions of Kazakh terms and cultural references. Some of the stuff was odd. I guess it would make more sense to someone who grew up in Kazakhstan. This is a country where Chase the Girl is a popular pastime, a kissing game played on horseback. Probably not appropriate for a mid-winter indoor gathering of urban sedentary adults. Nevertheless, with 199 games to choose from I quickly copied & pasted half a dozen to my notes. What boggles the mind is that someone in those frozen northern steppes went to all the trouble of translating into English and sharing with the world pages and pages of games they collected over the years. The internet really shrinks the globe.

The evening was a success. The decorations were great, the food was tasty, there was enough for seconds and very little left over at the end. Just perfect. There was much hilarity over the games, and a good time was had by all. So that fulfills my social responsibility quota. I can return to my cave and go back to being a hermit for the rest of the year.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 11:13 pm. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.