Every year Laura invites us over to her house to celebrate New Year's Eve. A typical Italian, she is happiest when her kitchen is over-flowing with friends and family. It doesn't matter that she runs a big research lab at University Hospital while raising two teenaged children, always worried about grants, zipping all over the world for conferences. She doesn't flip out if the wine glasses don't match. Paper plates work fine. Everybody brings something. She's the kind of hostess I've always wanted to be, one who enjoys her own parties and can't wait to coordinate the next get-together.
The key to Laura's success is her strict adherence to tradition, which is probably the single biggest contributing factor to Italian survival over centuries of foreign invasion, that innate, stubborn refusal to even consider the possibility that the show will not go on exactly the same way it has always has, no matter what.
Guests arrive between 9 and 10pm.
The same group of international misfits is invited every year. Joanna from Finland, Jens from Germany. A couple of Americans like me thrown in to be polite. Everybody with kids in tow.
Laura bakes two trays of homemade focaccia, one with onions, a second with olives.
And she always cooks a big pot of lentil soup, because if you eat lentils on New Years Eve you will be lucky with money in the coming year.
A couple from Tennessee stops for a big order of carry-out barbeque on the way back from their parent's.
After dinner we all write our New Year's wishes on a piece of paper, fold it over so no one can see, and burn them in the fireplace.
And then we play tombola.
Everything is fun. But it's the tombola we look forward to more than anything else from year to year.
Which is funny, because it's just the Italian version of Bingo. Nothing fancy or electronic. But it's when the kids come in from the family room and the parents get up from the dining room table and we all take a seat together in the living room that the party really begins. The teenagers always clump together around the couch, perched on the arms and the coffee table. Michele calls the numbers, first in Italian, then English. Laura's son, Alexandros, helps. We use beans and bottle caps as covers. There's the normal complaining. "This card is terrible." "I haven't got a thing." But pretty soon somebody covers two in a row and yells, "Ambo." After Michele checks their numbers, the winner walks to the front of the room , kind of embarrassed by the attention, but pleased to be a winner, while everybody whistles and makes noise. Laura's husband, George (he's Greek) usually shops for all the prizes at the Dollar Store that morning and hands out one of the "Ambo" bags from the hearth. We watch as the person returns to their seat, opens the bag, and holds up a pencil sharpener or little stuffed bear. "Terno" is three numbers, "Quaterna," four, and "Cinquina" is five. "Tombola," the grand prize winner, is when the most lucky person of all covers all the numbers on their card. It takes over an hour to play one game.
This is the way they do it in Italy every year, every generation since the game was invented in Napoli in 1734. When we are in Italy for the holidays and go next door to call Don Peppino and Signora Anna, the couple who moved in the same year as Michele's parents, forty years ago, inevitably three generations are all huddled around the dining room table playing Tombola.
This year School Amici wants to share Tombola with our first-grade Adopt-A-Class at the Academy of World Languages. The school is home to students from more than 40 different countries, speaking 38 different languages. What better way to bring people of so many different cultures together than through a rousing game of Tombola?
We're looking for volunteers to make this a special party for these six-year-olds, many of whom are new to our country. It's on November 20 at 12:45p.m., Academy of World Languages and we need prizes, presents and Italian pastries to make it a day that we'll all remember.
Please contact Kathy@schoolamici.com or call 513 681-0224 if you can play a part in a great new tradition.
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| Family playing tombola |
The key to Laura's success is her strict adherence to tradition, which is probably the single biggest contributing factor to Italian survival over centuries of foreign invasion, that innate, stubborn refusal to even consider the possibility that the show will not go on exactly the same way it has always has, no matter what.
Guests arrive between 9 and 10pm.
The same group of international misfits is invited every year. Joanna from Finland, Jens from Germany. A couple of Americans like me thrown in to be polite. Everybody with kids in tow.
Laura bakes two trays of homemade focaccia, one with onions, a second with olives.
And she always cooks a big pot of lentil soup, because if you eat lentils on New Years Eve you will be lucky with money in the coming year.
A couple from Tennessee stops for a big order of carry-out barbeque on the way back from their parent's.
After dinner we all write our New Year's wishes on a piece of paper, fold it over so no one can see, and burn them in the fireplace.
And then we play tombola.
 |
| Tombola main board |
Everything is fun. But it's the tombola we look forward to more than anything else from year to year.
Which is funny, because it's just the Italian version of Bingo. Nothing fancy or electronic. But it's when the kids come in from the family room and the parents get up from the dining room table and we all take a seat together in the living room that the party really begins. The teenagers always clump together around the couch, perched on the arms and the coffee table. Michele calls the numbers, first in Italian, then English. Laura's son, Alexandros, helps. We use beans and bottle caps as covers. There's the normal complaining. "This card is terrible." "I haven't got a thing." But pretty soon somebody covers two in a row and yells, "Ambo." After Michele checks their numbers, the winner walks to the front of the room , kind of embarrassed by the attention, but pleased to be a winner, while everybody whistles and makes noise. Laura's husband, George (he's Greek) usually shops for all the prizes at the Dollar Store that morning and hands out one of the "Ambo" bags from the hearth. We watch as the person returns to their seat, opens the bag, and holds up a pencil sharpener or little stuffed bear. "Terno" is three numbers, "Quaterna," four, and "Cinquina" is five. "Tombola," the grand prize winner, is when the most lucky person of all covers all the numbers on their card. It takes over an hour to play one game.
This is the way they do it in Italy every year, every generation since the game was invented in Napoli in 1734. When we are in Italy for the holidays and go next door to call Don Peppino and Signora Anna, the couple who moved in the same year as Michele's parents, forty years ago, inevitably three generations are all huddled around the dining room table playing Tombola.
This year School Amici wants to share Tombola with our first-grade Adopt-A-Class at the Academy of World Languages. The school is home to students from more than 40 different countries, speaking 38 different languages. What better way to bring people of so many different cultures together than through a rousing game of Tombola?
Please contact Kathy@schoolamici.com or call 513 681-0224 if you can play a part in a great new tradition.
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