Tis' the season...

...to pull out Ye Olde Dreidel and have some good ol' Jewish gambling fun.

Seriously, I love playing dreidel. It's a pretty simple game: we each get a certain number of chocolate gelt (coins) to gamble with, and we all put a certain number in the "pot." The dreidel (a wooden top) has four sides, each with a Hebrew letter on it: gimel, he, nun, and shin. Each person takes a turn spinning the dreidel. If the dreidel lands on gimel, you get all the gelt in the pot. The letter he (or hei) means you get half of the pot. Nun means you don't get anything, and shin means you have to put in a coin. If you lose all of your gelt, you're out of the game. (Originally the game was developed as a cover for reading the Torah during Greek rule—when Greek soldiers were spotted approaching gatherings of Jews, they would hide the Torah scrolls, pull dreidels out of their pockets, and look like they were having harmless fun instead of engaging in illegal activity.)

Like I said, dreidel is simple but entertaining. My siblings and I get all intense about it long after the Hanukah candles have burned down:

"What?! This is the third time in a row that I got shin!"

"Come on, come on, gimel, gimel, gimelgimelgimel—darn it!!"

"All the gelt is mine, bwa ha ha!!!"

We don't play regular dreidel, though. We might play one or two rounds with the normal rules to reacquaint ourselves with the game...but we like to mix things up. And so, for the first time, I present to the Gentile world:

Xtreme Dreidel.

The first thing we do in Xtreme Dreidel is to attempt to spin the dreidel upside down on the little dowel rod. The game semi-pauses as upside-down dreidels skitter off the table and bounce into far corners of the kitchen ("not under the stove NOT UNDER THE—whew"). After we recover our dreidels and re-master this skill, we move on to spinning two dreidels at the same time: one upside down and the other right side up, or both upside down. All four of us try to keep our dreidels spinning upside down for the same length of time; we spin the dreidels on hands, heads, knees, and other odd surfaces; we spin off the table and onto the floor; we change the rules for the pot and steal each other's gelt; we have head-to-head spinning contests in which each contestant tries to knock the other's dreidel off the table...

After a while the game degenerates into a free-for-all of wobbly, colliding dreidels and culminates in the glorious Restoration of Gelt. This is the ritual of returning everyone's original amount of gelt, no matter who won the game. After all of that excitement and dreidel spinning, all we want is to eat our portion of gelt and quietly ponder whether the coins covered in gold foil taste any different than the coins covered in silver foil.

I'm looking forward to playing when I go home in a few weeks. Maybe I should buy a dreidel of my own and take it to the Onething Conference...have some fun in between sessions. That's a great plan: get thousands of youth to come to Kansas City on the pretext of learning about Jesus, and then sucker them into a life of gambling and addiction to chocolate.

But at least they'll learn some Hebrew. :-D

P.S. This is pretty funny. I hope the guy's next stop is Kansas City.