The Pass the Spoon Game revisited

Overheard on NPR:

The origins of "Pass the Spoon" are unknown to me. I only know that we continue playing it with a strange sense of daring, as if we are going to get caught, or become "the chosen one."

Pass the Spoon is a game played with the all of the Thanksgiving guests right after the gathered group has finished dinner (pre-dessert) and the food remaining on their plates has turned into scattered debris. The person to start the game is also the loser from the previous year. This person is given a fresh serving spoon upon which he places a piece of food from his ravaged plate. The spoon is passed to the person next to him or her and food is placed ever so carefully on the spoon. It continues to get passed in this manner. Food piles up on the spoon, creating a precarious load of disgusting gruel. This is the critical point of the game. Should a piece of food fall off the spoon on your turn, you must consume the remains of the spoon's content to the chanting and clapping of the savages with whom you just ate Thanksgiving dinner.

One eats the heaping mound of once tasty morsels with gagging disgust and wonders why this game exists. It is at that moment we all decide to forgo this tradition … until next Thanksgiving.

From Mary Weberg, Denver

So, I say to myself and yours: Surely we can make this game more fun for more people. Surely we can make a more universally thankworthy Thanksgiving ritual. There has to be a kind of gag that makes everyone laugh, and no one gag.

How about if we played this game with dessert instead? How about if we all had a spoon, and on our plates we each had a different dessert, or, better yet, a different ingredient. You have the pie, I have the cherries, she has the vanilla ice cream. And we all pass our spoons to the next person at the same time, and each person adds their ingredient and passes the spoon to the next, until someone yells "reverse" (or something of that ilk). And then we pass the spoons, trying everso hard to get the spoons back to their original owner without dropping anything. And then we see if we can get further next time. And when we think we absolutely can't go any further at all, we start over in the opposite direction. And then with the wrong hand, maybe. While singing, non-stop, mouths empty and full: "we gather together" or a round of "row, row, row your boat" or "over the river and through the woods" or perhaps engaging in the singing ritual of Estray Bonajour.

I guess it's all about what kind of fun we're trying to have. And whether it can be just as much fun when it's for everyone's profit instead of at someone's expense.


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith