Author Archives: Eric Leventhal

Thanksgiving Traditions

Nationality: American
Age: 49
Occupation: Travel Agent
Residence: Lake Bluff, Illinois
Performance Date: 3/18/2013
Primary Language: English

I learned from my informant that ever since she was a little girl, her family has always hosted a large Thanksgiving dinner.  Members of her extended family as well as members of the Stern extended family would come to her house and all have a big dinner.  Her mother would make the turkey and everyone else would bring something along or make something.  One person usually brought a vegetable salad.  She herself started baking desserts for Thanksgiving when she was in high school.  And these desserts rarely included anything pumpkin because no one in the super-extended family liked pumpkin very much.  Then after everyone was done eating and talking, they would all gather round and play card games and eat popcorn.  Hearts was usually the game of choice but some people also played spades.  Later in life, after most of the younger family members grew up and had gotten married, and the large family became even larger, they started playing huge games of hearts with multiple decks.

The rules for regular hearts are listed here so that the extended rules make more sense for those who have never played the original.  In hearts, a standard 52-card deck is divided between four players.  The player to go first in a round plays a card, then the next player must play a card of the same suit if possible.  After all four players have played, whomever played the highest card of the leading suit takes all the cards, then must be the starting player in the next round.  For the first round, the player with the 2 of clubs must go first.  Hearts may not be played on the first turn, and a player may not lead a turn with hearts until hearts have already been played.  Hearts are worth one point, and the Queen of Spades is worth 13 points.  At the end of the game, you tally all the points you have, and at the end of all the games, the player with the fewest points wins.  Additionally, before each game, you must pass three of the cards in your hand to the player in a given direction, alternating between left, right, across, and no pass.

For the extended version, all of the regular rules apply, except that the player to go first on the first round is the first player to the left of the dealer who has a 2 of clubs.  The only major addition to the rules is that multiples of the same card cancel out.  So if there are two King of Clubs on the board, and clubs is the leading suit, neither king counts for the highest card, and instead the turn goes to the player who played the highest singular card (non-canceled) in the leading suit.  In games with three or more decks, if the third multiple of a card comes out, then that card is not canceled and is treated normally.  Additionally, the passing order is slightly modified, and is now left, right, two to the left, and two to the right.  According to my informant, these new rules lead to emergent play.  First and foremost, players have a lot more power depending on where they are in the turn.  Players near the end are often begged and pleaded to cancel out whoever is highest (or not to cancel out the high player if said beggar/pleader has the second-highest card).  If you want to screw over a particular player, you may choose to cancel the high card and force someone else to take the turn.  Also, she says that when you are passing cards at the start of the turn, and your hand has multiples in it, you should pass one of the multiples to the designated person and then try and work with them to hurt others.  For instance, if you are dealt both Queen of Spades, you can give it to the designated person, and then plot to play them one after another, preventing either of you from having to take your own queens as well as sticking some unlucky bastard with 26 points in one turn!

My informant also told me of one last tradition that revolves around this large game of hearts.  At the end of the game, either when someone gets 100 points or everyone gets tired, the three players with the highest scores all got to go on the family vacation.

Magic the Gathering – Pile Shuffling 2

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: USC
Performance Date: 4/30/13
Primary Language: English

My informant spoke to me about rituals and practices of Magic the Gathering.  Of the most ritual acts of Magic is the shuffling ritual.  Since shuffling must always take place before a game, and since it involves the player’s deck, often something very personal to them, shuffling is very ritualistic.  While each player does it slightly differently, they almost always do it the same way and sometimes doing it differently gives you a bad feeling about the game.

The way my informant prefers to shuffle is with two runs of the 5-Pile shuffle, followed by riffle shuffling.  5-Pile shuffling is where you take the deck in one hand, or half the deck if it’s too big to hold, and you place cards from the top into five piles as though you were dealing out hands of poker.  You continue to place the cards into these piles until you have placed all the cards, then you pick them up and put them back into one big pile.  According to my informant, one of his friends told him this was the optimal way to shuffle the deck for good randomization.

I am also a Magic the Gathering player and I also employ the 7-pile shuffle method.  After each pile has been dealt, I will stack the 7 piles into two piles, then riffle shuffle those together before starting more riffle shuffle.  I learned the 7-pile shuffle method from a friend who simply said it was a good way to shuffle.  It’s also a good way to make sure you have the right number of cards in the deck, since you know which pile the last card should end up in if you did it right.  I also like the 7-pile shuffle method because when you start a game of Magic, each player draws 7 cards, so 7 piles for 7 cards lines up nicely.

Attached to the submission are two photos.  One photo is a demonstration of 5-pile shuffling and the other is a demonstration of 7-pile shuffling.

Clovers

Nationality: Romanian Italian American
Age: 53
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: 4/17/2013
Primary Language: English

My informant grew up in a town outside of Springfield, Ohio, in a relatively small community.  According to her, there wasn’t much to go out and do, so one of the things she loved to do was pick clovers and knock them into a necklace similar to a Hawaiian lei.  Some of her other friends would also make these necklaces with her.  Also she and her friends use to take these clovers and make them into a sort of potion for the fairies, and in exchange for this potion, they believed that the fairies would grant them three wishes.  My informant says she and her friends used to wish for stuff like having the longest hair of anyone they knew, but later in life they started making their first wish to be for a hundred extra wishes, which made the wishing get out of hand.

While I never made potions for fairies, there were certainly times in my life, especially after watching the movie Aladdin, where the topic of conversation between me and my peers turned into “if you had three wishes, what would they be?”  And almost everyone’s first wish was for a hundred extra wishes, or a million extra wishes, or infinite wishes, or something.  Usually we said stuff like that wasn’t allowed.  We certainly weren’t the wish police or the wish distribution bureau, so we didn’t care about fairness per se, but the point of the game was to see what kinds of things people wanted, so limiting someone to thee wishes was in the interests of a fair personality test.

Easter games and traditions

Nationality: Romanian Italian American
Age: 53
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: 4/17/2013
Primary Language: English

My informant came from a mixed background.  One side of her family was Romanian and the other side was Italian.  During Easter, she would take part in traditions from both groups.  One of the Romanian traditions she would partake in was called Choking Eggs, where two people make painted eggs and then hard-boiled them.  Each person would then take their egg and smash them against each other until one of them broke.  The value of winning was increased if your egg was especially pretty.  One of the Italian traditions involved playing a game called Bachi in the lawn and the game involved throwing marbles.  Also an Italian Easter tradition involved making all sorts of breads.  One such bread was a woven bread filled with breakfast foods like hardboiled eggs and salami and such.

Valentines Day

Nationality: Romanian Italian American
Age: 53
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: 4/17/2013
Primary Language: English

While she was at school, my informant partook in a Valentine’s Day activity wherein each child in the class makes Valentine’s cards for everyone, and then makes a box and decorates the box.  Children then go around and put their cards in everyone else’s box.  She said that she was not very good at arts and crafts as a young child and so she thought her box was terrible and plain compared to everyone else’s.  According to my informant, the other children’s boxes had dancers and straws and ballerinas and other fancy figures on the side of the box, and she felt very embarrassed about the state of her box.  Later in life, she said she realized that the other children had fancy boxes because their parent’s helped to make them.

When I was in elementary school, we too participated in the ritual of exchanging Valentine’s day cards.  We made our own box, but we usually just went out and bought a set of Valentine’s day cards at the store, which came in packs of 16 or 20.  Also it was tradition to tape a small portion of candy onto your Valentine’s cards.  Cards were given to every student regardless of the gender of the giver or the recipient.  For us, Valentine’s day was less about the making of boxes and more about getting free candy.