Geek Thanksgiving Traditions
So the day job let me out of my cage for what I hope will be the entire Thanksgiving 4-day weekend. I'm pretty much on-call this whole time, but now it's Saturday morning and I may be off the hook.

Our Thanksgiving traditions are pretty heavily influenced by college. My first year in college, I couldn't afford to fly back home (to Maryland) for Thanksgiving, so I was stuck locally (in UTAH, the horror). My roommate was in a similar boat, but he had relatives in Salt Lake City - and invited me to come up with him. So at least I wouldn't be alone on campus for Thanksgiving.

In retrospect, it would have been preferable. As I was still a teenager, I believed that my family had the monopoly (or at least lion's share) of weirdness in the world. I was in for a rude awakening. The family was entirely legally blind - which wasn't such a big deal - but they were probably also certifiably nuts. My roommate's uncle accused me nearly every hour of trying to smuggle booze into his house. The fact that I didn't drink didn't seem to convince him. For once, I actually relished the opportunity to actually STUDY during the holiday. We also watched all of the Star Wars movies (there were only three back then), which wasn't so bad. But for the most part, it was just a bizarre, uncomfortable experience.

So the following year, we decided to have an "Orphan's Thanksgiving." Anyone from our extended circle of friends who didn't have a place to go for Thanksgiving would meet up at one apartment, and we'd have a big Thanksgiving dinner among friends. Sort of a pot-luck thing. Locally. That first year we were at the apartment of Jonna-Lyhn and Holly - the gals I mentioned a few months ago who pulled me into starting a D&D campaign my first couple of days at college.

We had an absolute blast. We gamed all weekend long - boardgames, roleplaying games, etc. I don't think we got much studying done for finals that weekend, but it was (at the time) the best Thanksgiving weekend I had ever recalled. So we kept doing it.

One year we played both Ravenloft modules (the old 1E modules - the first one which ruled, and the second one which --- didn't, but could still be fun) during the entire weekend. 3-day marathon run. We were SICK of D&D by Saturday night. But we have fond memories of it now, a decade later.

And we're still doing it today. Though now we have a lot more family that live locally, so Thanksgiving day is a lot more family. But then Friday and Saturday we play boardgames, roleplaying games, videogames, and eat pretty much ALL the Thanksgiving leftovers. Saturday night we're so sick of stuffing and turkey sandwiches we order pizza. And we game to our heart's content.

At some point down the line, a friend at work loaned me "Tetris Plus" for the weekend. We'd stock up on videogames to play - so while some people were playing board games, others could be plugged into the Sega or Playstation or whatever. Tetris became kind of a weird tradition - this version was more puzzle-based, with the Tetris board being a spikey trap for this dumb little archaeologist. You had to arrange the pieces so that the professor would fall through as he walked back and forth. If he reached the bottom, he was rewarded with treasure. But as time went on, this spiked ceiling would descend on him. In two-player mode, the competition got FIERCE. We ended up buying the game ourselves, but we rarely play it EXCEPT on Thanksgiving. Ah, for all of Sony's recent crimes, at least they made the PS2 backwards-compatible with the Playstation.

Yesterday's roleplaying games included a one-shot D&D game for low-level characters in the afternoon, and the start of a brand-new Mage: The Ascension campaign (2nd edition - they really seemed to screw up the setting the more they worked with it after that) in the evening. LOTS of fun. Traditionally we also have a Call of Cthulhu game, but my wife just wrapped up her campaign last week.

Wednesday night and Thursday morning, my oldest daughter and I played a game of D&D miniatures. She developed a real strategy this time, and the game was extremely close. I guess I learned not to underestimate her. And it was a heck of a lot of fun. We had to leave the game Wednesday night to continue it in the morning because it was her bedtime. I remember looking at the map later that night, with her forces strategically placed at a choke-point where my missile-heavy forces couldn't get her without coming into deadly melee range with real bruisers, and thinking, "This is so cool. This is like what Geek Heaven might feel like."

So I REALLY look forward to Thanksgiving each year. We still have many of the same geek gamer friends, we're raising up geek gamer kids (well, some of them --- they all kinda do their own thing), and the weekend is always a blast. So among the many things I'm thankful for, Thanksgiving weekend and our little geek traditions for the holiday definitely rank up there too.
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 9:01 AM (Permalink)