First Word. Sounds like love (is, in fact, love).

The night before my family and our two best-friend families left New Orleans where we'd gathered to spend Thanksgiving, we crowded into the tiny living room of the house we'd rented to play charades. We snacked on left-over turkey and ham and made a gigantic bowl of "queso" (melted Velveeta cheese with canned Rotel tomatoes and chilis) to sustain us.

Charades used to be an annual Thanksgiving tradition for us. Over the 25 years we've celebrated the holiday together, we've played charades in my family's home, a hotel room in Laughlin, Nevada, a rented house in Florida and a number of different cabins in national parks across the southeast. The last few years, however, the game has been left off the agenda. This year we decided to bring it back.

For the record, I am not very good at charades. It takes me at least 10 seconds of my allotted 90 to count off how many words are in whatever movie, book or television show I am supposed to act out. If I wasn't so competitive, I'd be too embarrassed to even try to act out anything. But before my cheeks have time to redden, I just think about the points my team needs and start waving my hands and pulling on my ear and trying to communicate without using my words.

Anyway, it was a particularly dramatic Thanksgiving this year. Just how dramatic, I'll save for my book. It's enough to say that so much happened between lunch, when we passed a pen around to write our titles on scrap paper, and dinner that most of the group had forgotten about the Big Game.

Not Little Rebecca.

"Y'all," she finally called out into the kitchen, different bedrooms and outside patio space, "can we please just play charades?"

And so we did.

My mom was one of the first to act. We were on opposite teams. When she took her crumpled piece of sticky-note, I saw the panic set in. She doesn't like to be the center of attention. Like, at all.

"This is yours," she said to me, dejectedly, "I can tell by the handwriting."

My mom then set about trying to use her hands and body to depict the movie "Lady and the Tramp." She wasn't doing well--mostly using her hands to fan out a dress for her first word and then putting her hands on her hips and trying to look seductive for her fourth. The longer people had no idea what she was doing the more awful I felt for her. I'm very competitive, but I'm also compassionate. I'm what you might call a compassionate-competitor. I whispered that she should call on my favorite lifeline in charades, the trusty "sounds like" clue.

"Sounds like 'ramp,'" I hissed into her ear as a suggestion for something she might be able to successfully pantomime.

I saw my brother coming before I heard him. Brandon and I were on the same team.

It was like slow-motion only fast.

"No--o--o--o," he yelled. "Don't help her!

He reached for my head and pushed it back away from my mom's ear and, accidentally, right into the arm of the chair I was sitting in.

Thud.

Well, so now you know my brother is very competitive too. But compassionate as well. No sooner had my head hit the arm than he cradled me in a bear hug until I pushed him away telling him I was fine.

"Okay, you get 30 extra seconds for my disruption," Brandon told our mom and her team.

Unfortunately, the extra time didn't help.

I wish I could tell you who won. Probably Zac's 86-year-old grandmother could. We were 13 in number (sadly, three of our group had already departed) and she decided to sit out to make even teams of six. She acted as the keeper of the titles, referee and sometimes clue (when one of my teammates pointed to her, I successfully called out "old" for the first word of "Old Yeller"--for the record, she might also have been used for "elegant," "beautiful" and "damn good grandma.")

Love comes in all shapes and sizes. But sometimes it looks like this: a group of friends and family sitting three to a couch cushion and two to a chair shouting out guesses, laughing their asses off and passing each other chips dipped in melted Velveeta cheese.