The holiday season is filled with traditions. I'd like to share with you a favorite tradition of mine. (If you'd like to share one of your holiday traditions, feel free to use the comment feature.)
When I was in high school at Brookfield East many moons ago (or perhaps even earlier at Burleigh Junior High -- we're not quite sure), a group of us decided to throw a holiday progressive party. More than twenty years later, although the character of the party has changed and the number of attendees has dropped, we are still going strong. I hosted it this past weekend.
A progressive party is a dinner party in which each course of the dinner is hosted by a different person. When we first started, it made for quite the production considering (a) that parents had to be somewhat involved given that we were invading their homes and (b) that we had a limited amount of drivers since the majority of us did not have our licenses yet. Dressed in our holiday best, we drove all over Brookfield in all kinds of weather for years.
Over the years, we developed certain traditions. We had traditional appetizers -- spinach balls from Mike, egg rolls from me, and "shrimp aujourd' ***" from Liz. The traditional game held at the after-party was charades. (I think I've mentioned before that a lot of my friends were drama geeks.)
The traditional team match ups for charades were the Catholics against the Protestants (not sure how that got started), with one or two of the Catholics having to be re-baptized Protestant in order to have fair team sizes. One memorable moment was when someone was able to get his/her team to correctly say "Sussudio" a song by Phil Collins. (I told you we were geeky.)
Even when people went off to college, we all managed to reunite at Progressive time, sometimes even bringing boyfriends/girlfriends, and yes, we forced them to to play charades. Remarkably, one or two of them forgave us and married our friends anyway.
When we got tired of actually progressing, friends hosted the entire party at their homes, or we all decided on a restaurant in the area. As people began lives out-of-state and parents' sold the family homes, the number of attendees gathering in Brookfield dropped. Several of my friends moved to the MInneapolis area, and they have their own version of Progressive in Minnesota. I had Progressive at my house for the few remaining in the Milwaukee area.
The party was off to a shaky start when the spouse and I discovered that our corkscrew had gone missing. This necessitated a quick call to the neighbors who, god bless 'em, lent us theirs.
As we sat at dinner, we reminisced about old times, lamented our "old age," and exclaimed over the fact that our friends have a daughter who is now in high school. Kudos go to my spouse who cooked a great meal and to my friend Kathy who made the traditional spinach ball appetizers.
Good food. Good friends. Good times.
