Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Two very different games

As you read this, my family is probably driving home from west Tennessee, where we spent Thanksgiving with Bess' family and where I'm sure we had a wonderful time.

We celebrate Thanksgiving in the Volunteer state on every odd-numbered year, and we enjoy every even-numbered Thanksgiving with my family in Alabama.

There's one big difference between these two gatherings.

At my house, we always play the Turkey Bowl before dinner. My father inaugurated this event in 1976 when he donned his square-toed kicking shoe and booted the football into the pine trees for a touchback.

Since then, these games have become more exciting, first as my cousins and siblings and I grew older and more competitive, and then later as we chose athletic spouses and produced offspring bigger, faster and stronger than we ever were.

My brother raised the bar in 1997 when he invited a friend to Thanksgiving who'd happened to play linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks.

It's a different story at Bess' house, where we mostly sit by the fire and talk, and every now and then we'll work a crossword puzzle together. One person, usually Bess' mother, will call out the clues and the number of letters.

This year, I took several copies of the Ledger-Enquirer, which you may have noticed now includes a whopping three crosswords.

There's the newly added Universal Crossword, which is at least as difficult and maybe a bit more sneaky than Today's Crossword, which has now moved to the Classified section. Joseph Crossword -- with sample clues like "three-letter word for that bright thing that rises in the sky in the morning" -- remains in the Classifieds.

Anyway, the Joseph Crossword was dismissed as amateurish at Bess' house, but the other puzzles were deemed serviceable.

It's a tough crowd.

We once tried to play Balderdash, which requires contestants to make up definitions to obscure words and then vote on the ones that sound the most plausible.

The problem was that nearly everyone already knew the definitions of the obscure words, or they didn't see the fun in making up meanings for words that already had meanings.

Instead, we work crosswords. Or recite poetry or sing carols.

Maybe I'm underselling it here. We do eat incredibly well. We have turkey and country ham, and sometimes even goose. I'm not kidding.

We'll also go outside and take a long walk through the countryside. If there's a sport, it's birdwatching.

My point is that we don't play football. We don't even watch it, because we're so far out in the boondocks there's no cable or even cellular service.

I'm not complaining. It has its own charms and I'm perfectly happy with it.

In an unrelated matter, we left Tennessee this morning at 5 a.m.

You know, in time for kickoff.

Dimon Kendrick-Holmes, executive editor, dkholmes@ledger-enquirer.com

This story was originally published November 27, 2015 at 8:26 PM with the headline "Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Two very different games ."