Pinochle
Until I was about 14 years old, I thought one of my mom’s family’s traditions — the weirdest one — was one that everyone else celebrated, too. I was walking down the hall of my middle school with my friend Jenna the day before Thanksgiving break. “So, ya ready for Pinochle to visit?” I asked.
“Who?” she said, stopping to look at me.
“Pinochle,” I said, rolling my eyes. She stared blankly. “You know, the elf that shows up on Thanksgiving after you eat, and he flies around the windows…?"
“What are you talking about?” she asked with a look that told me everything I needed to know.
[In theory] Pinochle is Santa's right hand man, or elf, rather. He's deployed by Santa to catch you doing bad things when Santa's busy checking his list, or going over his route for Christmas Eve, or reading the very detailed third draft of the letter you sent him (which was, incidentally, the first time you signed your name in script on un-lined paper).
Being the sleuths that we were, we kids knew Santa could not single-handedly watch every child on the entire planet — he had to have help. Santa saw a lot, but Pinochle saw even more. He got places Santa couldn't, and he took notes.
He appeared every Thanksgiving after dinner but before dessert, a tiny red imp flying past one of the large windows in my Grandparents’ parlor. (And by “imp” I mean a doll in a red outfit, lit up by a flashlight, and by “flying” I mean swinging from fishing wire from an upstairs window.)
Having gorged themselves, everyone would be lazily sitting around, loosening their belts, when a flash of red would appear in the window. One of the kids (I have 22 cousins on just my mother’s side) would scream “IT’S PINOCHLE,” and the rest of us would go batshit, running around the parlor as he “flew” from window to window.
The spectacle would last only a few minutes, but the effect would last the entire holiday season. My mom would enter my toy-strewn room, cluck her tongue and say, “Pinochle’s not going to like this very much,” and walk out, basically ensuring a clean room 20 minutes later. My little brother was so paranoid he would only shower in the one bathroom in the house that didn’t have any windows because “Pinochle couldn’t see him in there.”
Then one year everything changed.
I was eight years old, accompanying my cousins in the mad dash around my grandparents' first floor, when Pinochle suddenly plummeted to the ground and lay there, still glowing red, but otherwise lifeless. I ran outside and parted the bushes under the window, where the elf lay in a heap on the ground. I hesitated to touch him. (Do elves … bite?) That's when I saw the flashlight and the fishing line.
“It's a doll?” I said to myself. I looked up at the window and saw my cousins, their noses squashed against the glass, watching with confused faces. Then I looked up at the sky, from which Pinochle had fallen, and saw my older brother and one of my aunts leaning out of an upstairs window. “It's … a doll,” I repeated, looking back down at the ground and bending down to pick it up. And as I looked into the face of Peewee (one of my favorite dolls, affectionately named after Peewee Herman), I was filled with all the indignation of a child who had spent the last eight holiday seasons on her best behavior because of a trick.
“IT'S A DOLL! HE'S NOT REAL!” I screamed, holding up Peewee for all my cousins to see. “PINOCHLE. IS. NOT. REAL!” My cousins all screamed like a bunch of Kevin McAllisters. Some burst into tears. The damage was done, the magic was over.
This wasn’t the first time I had “ruined Pinochle,” however, as a grumpy aunt who married into the family spat at me that night. When I was very young, maybe two or three, I had spent the entire night in my Grandmother’s lap, screaming my fancy, patent-leather holiday shoes off, because I was so afraid of the elf’s impending arrival. That year, Pinochle “went on vacation,” according to my Grandma.
One would think, though, that after realizing what I held that night was not, in fact, a dead elf, I’d put two and two together and rationalize that if Pinochle was a farce, then Santa and the Tooth Fairy had to be, too. That didn’t come until a few years later, when I happened upon some Easter baskets in the attic. Perhaps the same lapse in synapses in my brain can account for the fact that I didn’t realize Pinochle wasn’t a world-wide phenomenon until I was a year away from entering high school.
Since then Pinochle has been more of an idea than an actual visitor at Thanksgiving, which I still fully feel responsible for. I tried to make up for it last year by borrowing a light-up Harry Potter wand and a weird Christmas decoration from one of my cousins and enlisting them in the mission of introducing Pinochle to my four-year-old cousin, Luke. Trouble is, it was raining, I was a little drunk, and Luke took one look out the window at my busted-up Pinochle, said plainly, “That’s a doll,” and walked away.
KT Kieltyka has a blog about cancer and a blog about good things.
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I thought this was going to be an article about a family who plays Pinochle at their holiday get-togethers and I was all set to go on about how MY family does that and none of my other friends have ever even heard of the game and how much the Hairpin gets me! etc etc
But this was nice too.
@Inconceivable! my family plays pinochle too!
@justincredible My family used to, but we haven't in a while. I should make everyone play it over the holidays!
@Inconceivable! AAAH me too! Every year we drink and play pinochle until we're reduced to slurring "who led? wahts trump??" Every year my mother puts a deck of pinochle cards in my stocking and they go unused because no one my age knows how to play.
@phlox My family used to play pinochle too, though they don't so much anymore. I miss it, actually.
[Part of the problem is that there are only three of us and none of us like cutthroat as much.]
@rabswom Wait, how are you guys playing Pinochle? In my family Pinochle was a game where, if you said a word that started with the letter "P," everyone else in the family got to (lightly) punch you in the arm until you remembered to say "Pinochle!"
Is my family just weird?
@travelmugs I am unfamiliar with your version. Our version is the card game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinochle
I love it, but it's best played with four people.
Amazing.
However, I was under the impression that pinochle was a game played with pegs that my dad won't STFU about.
@Katie Walsh That's cribbage, which my dad makes us play during holidays, along with pinochle, and sometimes a word game called "Probe".
@Patrick M Once, my family went on vacation to Nova Scotia in August, where it rained and was cold for the whole two weeks. And the only games in the house we rented were Clue, a deck of cards, and an old cribbage set. I did learn how to shuffle that summer, though.
@Ophelia Also, there was a lake, and it had LEECHES. God, this really should be "The Worst Time I Went on Vacation"
@Patrick M CRIBBAGE. THANK YOU! He also won't STFU about pinochle the game either. Love you dad!
@Ophelia ah! i feel like i've been on that vacation too many times to count! chilling memories.
@Jane Marie right?? I don't know about your family, but mine always, always went places that were colder than home (MA) for vacation? I don't know what we were thinking, but now every vacation memory I have involves fleece and heavy socks.
@Ophelia
In my story Leech Lake is in New Hampshire.
My parents were trying very hard to get it off me without saying "Leech." My brother blew it. I screamed and screamed and screamed. Didn't actually hurt though. Then we all learned how to play Screw Your Neighbor.
@Katie Walsh MY DAD IS ALSO OBSSESSED WITH CRIBBAGE. And he's tried so hard, so no one will play with him or even learn it. Its a fucking Russian tragedy. Maybe I'll try and learn this year give him the greatest gift of them all.
@Ophelia So you were there for that one very special summer in Cape Cod, where it it rained so much our vacation house flooded? Or did you come with us on one of the many hiking trips where we reached the top of a huge mountain only for the rain to come down?
@Katie Walsh I used to go watch Project Runway at a cafe around the corner from my apartment. The other attendees were a group of gay guys in their mid-twenties/early thirties who were obsessed with cribbage. I think I still vaguely recall how to play.
@E
@Patrick M
Cribbage, pinochle…no one played mumblety-peg?
@E Cribbage is actually pretty fun. But maybe it only seemed cool when I learned it b/c it was from peers, not parents?
@atipofthehat Oh man, no joke, my dad used to talk about mumblety-peg all the time but he would always back off, saying we didn't have the right kind of knife.
@D.@twitter I learned cribbage from my grandpa, and I still love it/wish my friends would play with me
@Anna Jayne@twitter I'll play with you! I learned both cribbage and pinochle from my parents (with grandparental assistance on the latter), love both games, and spend plenty of time trying to convince my young-people friends they want to play them with me.
I've learned a few things, including that way more of the youngs know cribbage than pinochle, cribbage is definitely easier to teach, and trying to teach your friends pinochle will just lead to them declaring that euchre is better (which it most clearly is not) and then demanding to play euchre.
i wish we had a tradition like this!! i love the mental image of the adults drunkenly hanging out of upstairs windows watching kids run around like mad.
@honeybadger I feel as though having to gestate and squeeze out a big headed human should come with rewards like being able to terrorize them with fictional omnipresent creatures like this. I am so going to have a Pinochle one day.
Love the name btw.
Bah humbug. Kids these days don't believe in ANYTHING. I tried to get my four-year-old nephew to hunt swamp monsters with me over Thanksgiving but he was adamant (ADAMANT) that there was NO. SUCH. THING. as monsters and so I had to keep goading him with "Are you suuuuure?" and in the end he wouldn't walk to his bedroom by himself and refused to sleep by the window.
Imagination: 1, Nephew: 0
Achievement Unlocked: Traumatized Small Child at Family Gathering
@Yahtzii How sad!! My nephews are still actively afraid of monsters. The five-year-old still has an adult walk into a dark room first and stomp loudly to "scare off the monsters".
Maybe try snipe hunting next time?
@Yahtzii Oh, I was this kid so much and I resented everyone who tried to get my nose, not touch the lava, and stir "imagination" food in a pot at the fake stove. There are no fucking meat balls in there, alright? I may be four but I'm not stupid.
@Third Wave Housewife To be fair, this sounds more peaceful than being the kid to lays awake at night worrying if her mother's back is going to break because she stepped on a crack in the sidewalk.
@Third Wave Housewife ME TOO!!! Like, when I was a kid, I started to read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and I liked it a lot….until Lucy first goes into Narnia. Then I was like, "That can't happen, this is stupid."
@Four Horsemeals of the Eggporkalypse Hahaha, so…you liked it until page like, 18?
@wee_ramekin haha pretty much!! I was like, "what an awesome gritty look at life during wartime!!!" and then the magic started and I was like, "ugh fuck this."
@Four Horsemeals of the Eggporkalypse Your Narnia story reminds me: My MIL told me that she once tried to read my husband Sleeping Beauty as a bedtime story and he interrupted her, "Mommy, you can not wake ladies up from comas by kissing them. He should've called 911." After that he only ever wanted bedtime stories from the encyclopedia, because at least the things in there were true.
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,
the worms play pinochle on your snout.
Scary Stories taught me that pinochle is never to be trusted. NEVER!
@JessicaLovejoy
Stop storing those free jelly packets between your toes and you have nothing to fear.
@JessicaLovejoy I blame- almost in-full- all of my neurotic phobias on the horribly frightening imagery of those books.. that I started reading in SECOND GRADE.
Who let me do that?!!
@JessicaLovejoy SERIOUSLY, so scary! I never even read them – my big brothers did – but the thought of the illustrations still gives me nightmares!
@Hambulance I hid my copy behind some very large furniture for a great many years because I was so terrified of it. To this day, the illustrations still scare me. Can't really recall any of the actual stories though.
@JessicaLovejoy YES! I will still forever associate pinochle with decomposition because of those fucking dumb books from the 3rd grade reading club.
@Lauren Hayden The illustrations…Jesus Christ. I'm freaking myself out just thinking about the one with the connected heads on the cover. You know the one. Even though they're somewhere on a shelf, wedged between other children's books, I'm certain they are staring at me.
@Wookiee Hole Oh, and did anyone else want to be a poltergeist when they hit puberty?
@Lauren Hayden Yeah, the illustration to this one story "The Little Black Dog" STILL haunts me, even though the story itself isn't that scary?
@JessicaLovejoy Wait, the worms don't play tiddlywinks on your snout? Maybe they just like to change it up now and again.
i am wheezy laughing at the thought of all of this.
This would have made a fantastic Twilight Zone. Only in the Zone version, after everyone walks away from the doll, it gets up, dusts itself off, says "Santa isn't going to like this ONE BIT" and flies away screaming with laughter.
@atipofthehat What's the difference between Pinochle and a priest?
Only one of them goes limp when a child walks into a room.
@saythatscool
STC's favorite actor in 1951's Too Young to Kiss?
Van Johnson.
This reminds me of the time when I asked my friends what the Chicken Pox Chicken brought them when they were kids. I managed to reach twenty years old before I realized that wasn't a real thing.
@readabook This may not be real, but it sounds awesome. If you have to have chicken pox, you may as well get a visit from the Chicken Pox Chicken. I am assuming he comes bearing gifts?
@pterodactgirl Yup, he brought us a super cool toy kitchen set to play with while we got better, which was supposed to be our Christmas present, but my parents got desperate with two bored itchy kids in the house.
This was hilarious. I always feel like I missed out not being raised to believe in anything other than Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, Ahhhhhhhhh-men. Maybe my parents were just saving me from trauma?
By the way, your blogs are wonderful and have been added to my reader.
I'm sure you know that there is now a well-marketed version of this elf, and I can report back that every one of my friends who have kids and have used the elf have tragically hilarious stories about their children being traumatized. My favorite is a little boy walking around in underoos, cowboy boots and a toy gun tucked into his carpenter's belt who was sneaking around the house and when confronted, said that he was going to find that elf and take him down. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
But I love the part about how your elders made the effort with the flashlight and the window. I cannot imagine your terror upon his crash and your discovery!
@sox I was going to say — this sounds like the awesome family version of the creepy and commercial Elf on the Shelf, which creeps me out.
@Lily Rowan please tell me you have seen this.
@Lily Rowan
What is it about a pixie surveillance network that bothers you so much?
@becky@twitter HAHAHAHA!!!
@atipofthehat I was never big on Santa seeing me when I was sleeping and knowing when I was awake, either.
@becky@twitter I simply cannot wait to share this with the Elf Hunter's mother. Also, *shudders*
@Lily Rowan
The small daughter of a friend has forced their Elf on the Shelf into an arranged marriage with a very mean and unlikable doll named Frankie, so Elf on the Shelf is now too busy fighting with his doll spouse to report back to Santa.
I admire the hell out of this kid.
@City_Dater That is genius.
A thing in our family was le petit bonhomme janvier, who brought little presents like books and candy on New Years. I felt sad for the other kids who didn't have "T bonhomme"
@m.cat T! As a shortcut for p'tit! Perfect!
This was a bad story to read while having lunch. Meaning that I found it hysterically funny and that there is a not insubstantial amount of food/drink that never made it to my stomach.
Oh my god is that a tiny felted doll from Hearthsong? Like maybe the kind that came in a tiny tie-dyed drawstring bag and was exactly what you wanted for your birthday that year even though 20 years later you still had no idea what you even wanted the elf dolls for? Until just now when you saw this photo illustration and realized OBVIOUSLY they are the cutest ever and maybe you just realized would be ok with having children if you could get them adorable felted elf dolls?
It's not? Oh….ok.
@February Revolution I HAD THOSE TOO! When I was packing for college I found one, yay cleaning, and put it on my lamp pull and brought it with me to school (it was one of the ones with wire arms so it was hugging it, sort of?). It always made me so happy to have it there and yes, they are the best.
@February Revolution OH HEARTHSONG. Sing to me your sweet, sweet tunes of the hearth.
My (then childless) aunt loved sending me and my sister loads of candy when we were little. Specifically, those monster pixie sticks. Mom had managed to convince us that they were "pixie wishing dust" and every time we got some, we'd run shrieking into the yard and sprinkle the powder around. Eventually, I came home from a birthday party and told mom, "GUESS WHAT ELSE YOU CAN DO WITH WISHING DUST???" And it was all over.
@Michaela Daniel@facebook OMG wow.
@Michaela Daniel@facebook And I was so proud of myself at 15 when I figured out that pixie sticks could be used as magic wands complete with fairy dust!
@Michaela Daniel@facebook Aaaand you never slept again. Seriously those pixie sticks have a coke like effect on children!
I loved loved loved this story. I especially love the power of Pinochle to extract a clean room.
My family had an invisible elf named Timothy (so named because one of our typical Halloween decorations left a huge T-shaped imprint in our lawn) who would leave us little gifts on our pillows leading up to Christmas, with notes about being good and cleaning our rooms and stuff in tiny curly handwriting. It was a LONG LONG time before I realized that Timothy and the tooth fairy had the same handwriting.
@everythingbagel My mom never even tried to change her distinctive handwriting for the Easter bunny notes. I think when I have kids I may even send them letters from the bunny cut out from magazines kidnapper style. Too weird?
@everythingbagel my parents used to write our letters from santa in red ink. RED INK! Clearly only Santa had access to red ink. Mystical magical red ink.
This reminds me of "Mr Bumble" – my grandparents had a laundry chute in their old house in the bathroom, and once in a while when we were all there my uncle would go down into the basement and stick his hand through the chute so we could shake it – so adorable! Those were the days.
@MalPal Was this holiday related? I don't understand but I love it nonetheless!
While we're reminiscing about holiday traditions that no one around us understands, can I please get an "amen" from other Wisconsin natives who miss St. Nick's Day? And how much it sucks trying to convince the unbelievers that St. Nick and Santa Claus aren't the same thing?
Amen!
@Lauren Hayden Not from Wisconsin, but definitely Amen! Was so proud when I got to speak with authority (if very broken grammar) about the holiday in German class in grad school.
@Lauren Hayden Living in the Netherlands, I have become very, very aware of how different Sinterklaas is from Santa, and how there's a totally different day for it. December 5 is a frenzy around here, Christmas seems more low-key.
@Lauren Hayden AH. I was always scared of St. Nicholas– he seemed so knowing and eldritch compared to jolly, accessible Santa Claus. Maybe it was because I could never convince my classmates that St. Nicholas was a real tradition and not just a thing made up by my bizarro family?
@Lauren Hayden I'm from Wisconsin, but we never did St. Nick's Day (though PLENTY of my friends did). We always had visits from the nissen on Christmas Eve, though. They are elves that put candy in the couch cushions. What!?
@Lauren Hayden I am 27 and still got treats from St. Nicholas this year!!
@Lauren Hayden I'm 23 and I refuse to believe that St. Nick's Day is not a part of everyone's holiday season, but every single time I mention it, people look at me like I've got three heads. "He puts gifts in your shoes?!?!?" I'm attempting to single-handedly bring the joy of St. Nick's to every person I know. Glad to hear I'm not the only one!
I was every minute of 30 years old before I discovered that we were the only family Santa visited on December 23rd. At my house, we'd write letters to Santa and make him a sandwich on the 23rd…and then, at some point, he'd come over and measure our front door to make sure he hadn't gotten to large to fit thru it with his sack of toys. Assuming that he did (HE ALWAYS FIT!), he'd read our letters, write a response back, eat a sandwich and then scoot. I had no idea this wasn't a Thing for anyone else until about 4 years ago. None.
@CleverPseudonym Oh, I must know, why the 23rd?
@automaticdoor So he'd know what to pack for the gifting visit on the 24th.
@CleverPseudonym I love this story! These family traditions make me wish I could get credit for studying them, and measuring their impact on preserving family cultures. Or some such.
@Myrtle Hmmm, Anthropology term paper.
Our family elves are Ralph and Elaine, and they bring the underwear and socks one gets every Christmas for all the stuff on the naughty list from the year.
Of course, when you hit about age 14 and are a girl, underwear gets more interesting, so it's hardly a big disappointment.
I complained in a separate post about my terrible father, so it's nice to be reminded of a lovely memory courtesy of my wonderful (divorced, obv) mother.
It was Easter morning and I was 8, my sisters 6 and 4. As we arose to look for our Easter baskets, my mom indicated she'd heard something hopping around in the yard. As we three kids ran shrieking outside to rip open our baskets, mom sauntered up to the fence and said loudly, "Hmm, what's this..?"
"This" was, of course, a cotton ball she had stuck to a nail protruding from the fence. My sisters and I went rushing over as my mom opined, "I guess the Easter Bunny must've jumped over the fence here – and part of his cotton-tail got caught on this nail!" The three of us went instantly silent and saucer-eyed, regarding this relic with the same reverence as if it were a piece of the One True Cross.
Love you, mom!
@ejcsanfran Gorgeous story! This seems an appropriate place to tell my story of our encounter with the Tooth Fairy. My younger brother and I were in the tooth-shedding stage and very interested in increasing the money we were making. We hunted on the beach to find the best tooth-shaped white rocks, then told our Mom we were going to fool the TF into giving us money. "Oh" she said. We deposited our faux-teeth into a small clear jar filled with water, on our nightstands as per usual. When we awoke, we saw the stacks of metal in the glasses and hooted with joy- Quarters? Really?!!! But looking into the glasses, we found instead the stacks were quarter-sized metal washers. The Tooth Fairy had gamed us right back! Well Played to parents who were such a disappointment otherwise.
@Myrtle: I'm trying to decide whether I love you or your mom more.
@Myrtle That is pretty awesome.
I am unclear whether this was an actual "Christmas tradition" with my Dad's family, or just something that happened once and left indelible scars:
Dad's family is Jewish, and as a child, he resented it that he did not get Christmas presents like the other kids; he felt Hannukkah to be kind of a cheap knock-off holiday. This attitude appears to have irritated my grandfather. Thus on the night of the 24th, shortly after Dad and his siblings had been put to bed, Papaw went into the yard and shouted loudly, "I don't care what your name is, fatso, get those reindeer off my roof!"
Dad used the excuse of marrying Mom, who is kind of vaguely Baptist but really an atheist, to start having Christmas. He's always the one who insists on getting a tree, and the times we've done outdoor decorations, it's been at his insistence and with extreme reluctance on her part. Though he does alternately call the tree a Hanukkah Bush or an Ice Cream Tree, etymology of the latter being unclear.
I think we should bring Krampus back into the holiday pantheon.
@D.@twitter Oh, shit, der Krampus is not someone you mess with.
@Wookiee Hole Um, I just watched that and Krampus is fucking terrifying.
Try : this krampuslauf. Now imagine experiencing it as a /child/. *shudders*
…Can't wait to do that to my own kids!
My family is Italian so we always had visits from the Befana on the Epiphany. My nonna would dress up in a long brown wig, brown mumu, huge straw hat, walking stick and basket and come up the driveway. She would bring stockings full of treats, have some panettone and wine, say a prayer under the tree and then go. My nonna would then come downstairs and act shocked that she missed the Befana, again! It was amazing.
I thought this was the sweetest story. I love how your whole family got together to watch for Pinochle. I also love that once kids graduated to knowing that Pinochle wasn't real, they got to help carry on the tradition.
That's so adorable. I think I might have a Pinochle if I ever have children.
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