The Marvin Award – A New Family Tradition

It’s really amazing to me that Thanksgiving is eight days away, and I’m looking forward to spending the holiday watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and eating a ton of food with my family. This year, our Thanksgiving dinner will have a new family tradition – the presentation of the Marvin Award.

The Marvin Award is affectionately named for my 85-year-old grandfather, who is still sharp as a tack and plays golf once a week (although rumor has it he sometimes takes the golf cart where it doesn’t belong). The idea for the award jokingly came about because Grandpa leaves crumbs around his seat every time he eats. It got to the point where my mom started to put towels on his chair so he wouldn’t stain her dining room furniture!

This summer, we finally decided to make the Marvin Award a legitimate competition just before our first all-inclusive Levy family cruise. It quickly became a highlight of the vacation. As the week passed, my family created a set of rules to help us decide who the nightly winner would be. Here are some of them:

• You’re not allowed to clean the area surrounding your plates/personal space as you go. That’s cheating!
•  Bread causes a lot of problems in terms of messiness, so we had to think up new ways to avoid crumbs flying around the table. Some of us buttered the top of the roll instead of opening it up, and others (like me) held it over our plates and were extra careful.
• If a waiter showed up after the meal with a crumb catcher, we had to evaluate the standings before he or she cleaned up the table.
• If someone spilled something in your space while attempting to fill their plate, that’s your problem. It’s your mess!
• Should the server make a mess in your space, that also counts as your mess. My mom won the Marvin Award at a Brazilian steakhouse because the guy holding the meat made a mess around her plate.

Different family members have different opinions of the Marvin Award. My cousin Jillian and my dad are proud repeat winners (or offenders), but others (my aunt, for example) weren’t too pleased about winning. As for me, I ALMOST won the coveted trophy once, but then someone turned out to be messier than me that night. I have a feeling I’ll win it eventually, though. It seems that, without reminder, the trophy shows up at every family gathering, regardless of location.

The Marvin Award is really a no holds barred competition, but I hope no one assumes that this is all that happens at family gatherings. After a while, most of us forget that there’s an ongoing competition in the middle of dinner. Everything about it is all in good fun, and it’ll certainly make Thanksgiving that much more exciting this year!