Singings Carols after dinner? That's so old school...

I have to admit, one of the reasons I knew Nick was "the one" was because he put up with my friends and my's wacky antics. At a time when no one had full time jobs and we were often relegated to hanging out at each others' parents' houses, one of our favorite things to do was play Celebrity. It was a charades-like game made up by one of my friend's family. To this day I still make fun of my brother for his poor attempt at acting out Mickey Mouse (it looked like a squirrel) and we joke about a friend's Frodo impersonation. One of the first times I introduced Nick to my friends we played this game and he got into it, it was how I knew he'd fit right in with our off-beat ways.

After reading a recent post on an online forum, I realized it could be a great game to play at a holiday party when you're trying to think of something to do and you don't want to play the same old board games or gather round the old piano to sing carols.

Here's how it goes:

1. Divide in to two teams. We generally split up siblings and significant others because they have psychic powers!

2. Each team member writes down 10 celebrity names on a piece of scrap paper, crumples them all up and puts them in a hat. Names don't have to just be celebrities. They can be made up characters like Mickey Mouse or people you all know, like "so and so's dad." And it's ok to have doubles, or even triples.

3. The game is played in three rounds. Each team takes turns going for 2 minutes until all the names have been used up. Then you put them back in the hat and move on to the next round. Each name is worth one point and only members of your turn can guess when you are acting out the name. So if you are player 3 v 3, Team 1's first player goes for 2 minutes then Team 2's first player goes for 2 minutes. If the names aren't used up yet, Team 1's second player goes for 2 minutes, and so on.

4. First round, you can say and do whatever you want to get your team to guess. So if the person was Donald Trump you could say, "this is a guy with a bad comb over. He has a reality TV show and is really rich. You're fired!" and do the hand motion.

5. In the second round you can only use two words. So for Donald Trump you can reference what you said before and say "comb over" or "You're fired!"

6. In the third round you cannot use any words and only act out the names. You might do the hand motion for "You're fired!" and move your hair over to look like a comb over, and hopefully people were paying attention earlier and can guess it means Donald Trump.

7. At the end, tally up all the points and the team with the most wins!