Bananagram Christmas Edition

Back in September, some dear friends came to visit and gifted us our own set of Bananagrams — a game that’s a bit like Scrabble, but faster, louder, and far less dignified.

The idea is simple enough: everyone races to build their own little crossword grid using letter tiles. When someone uses all their tiles, they shout “Peel!” — at which point everyone has to grab a new tile and somehow rejig their board to make it fit. First person to use all their letters wins.

In theory.

We quickly discovered that we are not, by nature, a very remembering family. “Peel” was promptly forgotten, replaced instead by… well, whatever word happened to come out of someone’s mouth in the moment. And once a word is declared, that’s it — for that session, that’s the word.

So when it came time for a Christmas game night, we figured it needed a festive twist.

We tried a few variations. One attempt involved only Christmas-related words, which turned out to be both slow and mildly chaotic — with an alarming amount of “tile swapping”. And by tile swapping, I mostly mean Juniper discreetly (and not-so-discreetly) raiding Peony’s tiles and leaving her with what could only be described as the worst possible set. Hehe.

We also tried a group version of Christmas words, but it turns out that when you’re mid-grid, brain humming, clock ticking, your ability to recall festive vocabulary disappears entirely.

In the end, we gave up trying to make it clever.

We played Bananagrams as intended — but with a completely random Christmas-adjacent word shouted whenever it was time to pick up a tile. What followed was a lot of giggling, a fair bit of silliness, and absolutely no record of what the word actually was.

All of it accompanied by a tagliere de salumi, a little Christmas jazz in the background, and the kind of evening that doesn’t photograph well but settles somewhere warm and lasting.

What an evening. :)