NO, NOT THAT COOTIES. READ ON.

This is the extra blog post I mentioned earlier.

One thing I love about our family is our traditions. Today we’ve spent the day together celebrating Christmas in July—something we started about six years ago when we got tired of the hustle and bustle during December.

• We eat lots of food (Aunt Marilyn always brings german potato salad, Lisa T brings a corn salad, Lori brings taco salad, Aunt Marge brings shrimp and pizza lasagna, and there’s lots of grilling of brats, burgers and ribs—we all have meat sweats by late afternoon since we just can’t stop eating).
• We do a white elephant gift exchange—and without fail, one of the women somehow ends up with a tool and ends up just giving it away after trading is over.
• We take a family photo—and everyone gives my mom grief—but because of her, we have family photos dating back a loooong time. And I take a cousin photo.
• Depending on the location, there’s a fishing contest or turtle races or both, there are lawn games, sometimes there are fireworks and a campfire and s’mores.
• There’s always cards (euchre, of course, since we’re midwest people).
• And eventually a game of Cooties breaks out and we relive the best stories from the glory days when we all played Cooties for a week when we camped together (Greg was a master from a young age, and today he proved he still has it).

So we all got to wondering…is our family the only one that plays Cooties? Do you have any idea what Cooties even is? I asked on Facebook and predicted 90% would have no idea, and I was dead on. If you don’t count the people directly associated with our family, 91% of the people didn’t know what I was talking about…and most of them thought I was talking about the box game Cootie. (To be honest, I totally forgot the box game was even a thing when I initially posted!!)

So what IS our cooties? I went to Google to see if I could find a succinct definition and I really couldn’t find anything. What? Google failed me? Eventually I found this, which is the basis of our game:

It’s an infection tag game, whereby one person has the cooties and must try to pass it on to someone else. You can’t get the cooties if your fingers are crossed. So if you are the one with cooties, you must catch someone who isn’t paying attention (hence my fingers crossed in the photo). There are lots of good stories, but the best one (and is the aforementioned one with my cousin Greg), is as follows.

We were all packing up and rolling out after a week of camping (pretty sure it was the annual trip to Harrisville). I don’t know how old I was, but it was before my parents divorced, so it was before 4th grade—I’d guess I was maybe 7 or 8? We were in the Oldsmobile ’88 pulling our popup camper, slowly driving out towards the campground exit when we see Greg (who is 4 years older than me, so right about pre-teen) FLAT OUT RUNNING towards us waving his arms crazily. Of course we stopped, assuming we had forgotten something or there was some other emergency (he had cut through the woods to get to us). My mom rolled down her window (was it my mom? how is this part hazy?) and Greg came right up to the car, reached out, and smacked her arm while yelling COOTIES! And there was much laughter on his part and much confusion and damnation on our part!! We had been sooooo close to escaping! And obviously cooties were the last thing on our minds. Well played, Greg, well played. The fact that we’re still talking about it almost 40 years later really says something.