Thanksgiving Party 2015

We often host Thanksgiving and every year I host I try to come up with a great idea for a game or activity.  I am often asked to do this and let me tell you it is not easy coming up with fun games or activities that are good for all age groups and fun for those that might not be into things.  For this year I first did a nature scavenger hunt for the little ones.  I gave them each a paper with a picture of what they were to find because little ones can't read yet.  If they completed it they got a little prize.  For the slightly older ones 8 years old to teens I did a family bingo but they had to get a black out.  This is great if you have people that don't know a ton about each other and you need an ice breaker.  It has things like. find someone whose favorite color is yellow, or who has braces, or who knows another language.  They could ask anyone at the house the questions and that person had to sign their name in that box.  To make it harder the people could only sign their name once! They all got prizes as well.  

For the big game this year I think I came up with a winner. FAMILY JEOPARDY

  I starting with having everyone try to give me about 3-5 quotes or silly/dumb things that their family members have said or done. In my family this is not a hard thing to do.  I asked for these about a week ahead of time because it is really hard to get people to respond.  If they didn't come up with something, I could usually remember something myself.  

The first thing I did was type up all the different sayings or doings with a "key" to tell me who said/done it. Then it was time to come up with the categories.  This was the fun part after reading through all the quotes I came up with some that fit most.  My categories were:

From the mouth of babes

Darwin Award Winners

Don't try this at Home

We're Not Racist

That's what she said

I put each quote in whatever category I thought it fit best.  For the poster board I put all the categories and then tapped slips of paper starting at 100 points all the way to 1400 points.  I had everyone sit around in the living room and just chose the first person to pick the first category.  Once the question was read the first person to raise their hand got to have first dibs on answering. If they got it right I gave them the paper with the point value on it.  The person with the most amount of points at the end of the game won a "million bucks" (a chocolate bar with a wrapper that said a million bucks and had dear on it. The one stipulation I had was that if it was your quote/action or you were part of it you couldn't respond.  I did end up with a ton of Darwin Award winners.  That was things that people did that probably should have killed them but didn't.

After each quote/ action was answered we either explained what was meant or told a little more about the story and that make it even more funny.  For example one quote was, "I'm gonna knock you up." the story behind the radical quote was 2 brothers were mad at each other and one getting flustered mixed up I am going to knock you out and beat you up.  Which brings us to "I'm gonna knock you up"

It was a ton of fun and we were all rolling on the floor.