Man, this year’s Thanksgiving-to-December transition was a tight one, wasn’t it? Toight. We had only just barely unbuckled our pants for our annual tryptophan-induced couch lounge when the record scratched and ding-ding!  Time for merriment.

I celebrated the rollover from Thanksgiving to the Christmas-Hanukkah season the same way I do every year: by unpacking my snowman collection and yelling at Kyle about something in the house that is affecting my decor.  This year it was a cabinet in our bar area that will not ever get a single decoration.  For his part, Kyle brought up my boxes of tissue-wrapped snowmen and pretended to listen to me.

I am always a little grumpy at the start of December because I get to spend Thanksgiving with my sister and then am sad when she and her family go back to North Carolina.  I am jealous of people who live so close to their sisters that they have the luxury of being mad at them over trivial matters like who makes the better three bean salad and why it took 15 minutes to respond to a text.  Everyone I know with local sisters are always mad at their sisters about something or mad that their sisters are mad at them about something.  That kind of proximity sounds amazing.

My sister has two sons, ages 8 and 4, and I have two sons, ages 14 and 10 – so, as you can imagine, there was a lot of testosterone happening around my parents’ house.  There was also a lot of “6-7.”

Like “Deez Nutz” and “No Cap” and every other nonsensical slang term that has rolled out of TikTok and into our children’s mouths, “6-7” is the latest gibberish plaguing middle and elementary schools across the country.  By “gibberish” I mean GIBBERISH; unlike “Deez Nutz” and “No Cap,” “6-7” has no meaning whatsoever.  It originated from some stupid video and includes a stupid hand motion in which the speaker moves his or her hands up and down like they are juggling balls while they say the words “Siiixxx-seeevvveeennn” in a saucy way, and can be done whenever or wherever but especially if a person sees or hears the numbers “6” and “7” in proximity to one another.  Kyle carved a 6 and a 7 into our Halloween pumpkin and when I answered the door a large group of teenage girls said, “Siiixxx-seeevvveeennn” instead of “Trick or Treat.”  I gave them candy anyways because that was Kyle’s fault, not theirs.

As is the case with every slang term nowadays, “6-7” is blessedly becoming Bunz/Cringe/Mid/Trash/whatever the current term is for “Cheugy” amongst teens but is still wildly popular with the littles, including my sweet nephews and, secretly, Ten (because Fourteen made him stop saying it so often).

“Do you have much more to bring in?”  My mom asked as we unloaded the car.

“Not much; maybe 6 or 7 items?”  I said since I am a fool.

“Siiixxx-seeevvveeennn,” my nephews said.

“Siiixxx-seeevvveeennn,” Ten said because Fourteen would never get mad at the littles.

My 8-year-old nephew LOVES basketball.  As an unbiased expert, I would say he is the best 8-year-old basketball player in the world.

“What did you do this morning?”  I asked Eight after we had settled in.

“I played basketball and I did basketball warm-ups and I looked at basketball cards,” he said.

“And what did you dream about last night?”  I asked.  “6-7?”

“Siiixxx-seeevvveeennn,”Eight said.  “I dreamed about basketball.”

As Eight loves basketball and is the best basketball player in the world, my parents set up a basketball hoop on one of the closet doors in the basement.  I was going to write, “Naturally, as Eight loves basketball…” but if you had asked me as a youngster if my parents would one day own a basketball hoop and mini hockey nets and let people take all of the cushions off the couch so they could jump from the springs of the couch onto the cushions on the floor while screaming whatever sound or word is in their minds, I would have said a hard no – and, yet, here we are.  To be fair, my sister and I spent our childhood doing hardcore activities like “Playing School” and “Dressing Alike” so my parents’ lack of basketball hoops/mini hockey nets/jumpable couches/quiet voices may have been a situation of circumstance more than anything.

On Wednesday evening, Ten, Eight, and Four shot baskets.  For every million or so baskets they shot, Fourteen would grace them with his attention and shoot one from across the room.  By Thursday morning, Fourteen was bored with amazing his cousins with his amazing shots and invented a game called…ready for it…6-7.

The basketball game 6-7 was played exactly like the game of PIG, except that they used the numbers 6 and 7 instead of the letters P-I-G.  In 6-7 and PIG, a player takes a shot, and the other players must copy the exact shot or they get a letter/number.  Since the inventor of the game was a full decade older than the youngest player there were some additional “Do-Over” rules to keep the game going and to reduce the expected tears and “NOT FAIR!”s.

If the boys had been playing 6-7 on a normal basketball court, to copy a shot would be to stand in the same place as the lead shooter.  Since they were in a basement, however, with couch cushions and springy couches and an inexplicable thick foam mattress topper which had been laid out on the floor in front of the couches in place of the coffee table (which had become a fort in another area of the basement), the environment was also a part of every shot.

“Okay, so you roll over the chair,” Ten said, rolling over a leather armchair, “And rub my mom on the head” – rubbing the ball on my head as I was sprawled out on the mattress topper watching football – “and then stand on the arm of the couch and SHOOT.”  He shot, making it.

“My turn!”  Four screeched.  He rolled over the chair, rubbed the ball on my head, stood on the arm of the couch and shot, making it.

“Maybe Auntie doesn’t want a ball rubbed on her head,” my brother-in-law said.

“This is how I prefer to play basketball,” I said.  “I’ve played 6 or 7 games already.”

“Siiixxx-seeevvveeennn,”Eight said, rubbing the ball on my head.

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The photo above is of my sister and me. We were participating in the hardcore activity of “Watching Children at an Open Skate.”

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This week on North Dakota Today, we talked about the Gobble Girls and Guys at the Grand Forks Senior Center, my Nice People of the Week, as well as a group of gamers who have been raising money for Sanford Children’s since 2013. (Valley News Live)

Here is the fifth paragraph of my Grand Forks Herald column: The male frontal lobe, and especially the prefrontal cortex, which governs decision-making and impulse control, generally doesn’t mature until the age of 25. People much smarter than I have determined that early intervention during this period of brain development can lead to a greater capacity for reform – and so the DOCR, in partnership with Vera’s Restoring Promise Initiative, created UNITY Village, a specialized cell block within the State Penitentiary’s General Population unit for young men ages 18 to 25. (Grand Forks Herald)

In VERY NICE news, a customer (Pam Thorson) struck up a conversation with her favorite grocery store checker (Elvira Gentry), leading to the customer getting a much-needed mammogram and cancer treatment. (Fargo Forum, found via Oops Only Good News)

Lasagna truly does love North Dakotans. (Valley News Live, found via Oops Only Good News)

A new Tyrannosaurus rex has been uncovered in Bowman County. (KFYR TV)

This isn’t nice news, but it is “Get the word out” (and donate) news: Drew Sheeley is one in a million. (Grand Forks Herald)

I love when the news in North Dakota is so slow that it includes lost emus. (KFYR TV)

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