I Hereby Share Our Holiday Game w/Y'All

Now don’t hold me responsible if anything goes wrong with this. There’s a reason why I haven’t actually trademarked this game — in the wrong hands, it can be somewhat dangerous. However, I feel confident that Dopers can be counted on to be the Right Hands.

Our game is Christmas Bingo.

It all started with my Hubby’s habit of counting the Santas and Jesuses as he drove home from work. Of course, Santa outnumbered Jesus by a fair margin. Wasn’t even close.

So the first year the game was the Christmas Census. That is, one evening we wrote the names of different decorative items on little slips of paper, drew them from a hat at random, and each person in our car (except the drive; this is key) counted the number of “snowmen”, “wreaths”, “Santas”, etc. I’ll just go ahead and tell you that the candy canes blew every other decorative element out of the water.

However, the best part that year was the “wild card” category of “inappropriately blinking lights”. That is, homes with multiple strands wherein most of them are blinking to a tango while one renegade strand is doing the watusi. It takes a keen eye to spot these irregularities. You might also consider looking for misplaced elements, such as one neighbor of ours who ran out of reindeer and substituted one of the Wise Men’s camels on his rooftop Santa display.

Having established the Christmas demographics, we knew we had to find another angle. Hence Christmas Bingo.

Make up some Bingo cards with pictures of various decorative items, keeping your players’ aptitude in mind, and have some fun driving around.

Just be careful! If you hit any parked cars or mailboxes, don’t come whining to me.

I know a house around here that would definitely fill out an entire bingo card. Or three.

Oh. Is that why the driver doesn’t get to play?

Yep. No extra points for hitting carollers, either.

We’re thinking we may hire a limo and driver when the kids are old enough to play, so that we can all participate.

Seriously, it’s a hoot. Makes that annual drive around envying the bigger houses into a more amusing pasttime. And you really start noticing the weirdness out there - believe me, it’s worse than you realize from a casual drive by.

Just be sure & use pictures on the bingo cards. Going from visual to text and back is waaay too hard and gives everyone a headache.