More Cutthroat Christmas Bingo

2013 Bingo prize bags

If your family likes fun Christmas traditions, and if you are a good sale shopper, go out right now and find yourself some greatly discounted small Christmas gift bags.  I just found my bingo prize bags for Christmas 2014, and they are packed away with my other gift wrap, ready for next year's Christmas cutthroat family bingo.

We've been doing this for the past three years, and anyone, young and old, can participate if you use bingo cards with Christmas pictures instead of words or numbers.  Even little Ellie (two years old) played this time with a bit of help.

He thinks he's gonna win.

By the way I've noticed some other bloggers are still doing Christmas recaps, so apparently I'm not breaking any rules here.  I'll shift over to the next holiday soon, just not yet.  I'm still enjoying my memories from Christmas, thank you very much.

I don't exactly know how we started this Christmas bingo tradition.  All I know that it has been requested every year since then.

If you do a Google search of "Christmas bingo," you will find a plethora of sites that offer you the ability to print free bingo cards.  These cute cards came from the website crazylittleprojects.com.

 I printed the player cards and calling cards on card stock paper for more durability.  There are eight cards, so contestants played a few rounds and then passed their card on to another family member.

For fun game pieces we used M & M's in various special Christmas flavors.

I went to the Dollar Store to shop for the prizes. Some of the prize bags contain good, useful items.  In others there are booby prizes - a stinky sock, a silly tattoo sleeve, a plastic shower cap.

There is no rhyme or reason as to who gets what.  My mother's prize bag contained a box of Reese's Pieces.  She's deathly allergic to peanuts.  Oops.  Of course there were others in the room only too glad to relieve her of her deadly prize.

Some contestants ate too many of their game pieces, so that they came up short towards the end of the round.

Other contestants were thieves, and stole prizes when backs were turned.

It's cutthroat, I tell ya.  But lots of fun too.

It was just heartwarming to me to have both sets of our parents, all four of our children and all their spouses, and all of our grandchildren in one room at the same time.  That happens so rarely, but is so special when we are all together.  From ages two to 85, all having lots of laughs and fun.

And for me, that beats all the prizes in those bags!