The Top 8 Types of Holiday Hunger – Told Through Magic Cards
The holidays at the end of the year are always a time to celebrate our (maybe not so) suppressed enthusiasm for food. Of course, there are several different types of hunger, and in most families, all of them will be on display. Here are the Top 8 types of hungers, communicated through everyone’s favorite children’s trading card game.
- You - Untamed Hunger
Mom always says come with an appetite, and you like to deliver! As you are statistically likely to be a college student or recent college grad, you don’t eat so great during your time away from home. Doritos, gummy bears, and ramen might be able to get you through exams, but you’ve probably forgotten what it actually feels like to be full.
As you walk through the door and smell that home-cooking, you begin to salivate. You realize that you’ve forgotten what unprocessed food tastes like, and you’re only too eager to jog your memory. The food flows through your nose and fills your mind. It’s all you can focus on. You feel stronger and more menacing, aggressively forcing your way through the crowd of aunts and cousins. Your untamed hunger might not be pretty, but you’re finally going to expose your taste buds to something that doesn’t taste like cheese, sugar, or salty nothingness, and that’s well-worth the uncomfortable stares.
- Cousin and Harvard Graduate Seraphina - Appetite for Brains
Once you’ve regained the ability to have conscious thoughts beyond “FOOD. EAT. YUM,” you’ll be able to focus on the second-greatest element of family meals – trying (and failing) to avoid conversation. During the holidays, everyone’s back – including Cousin and Harvard Graduate Seraphina. Everyone’s got a Cousin and Harvard Graduate Seraphina. That one member of the family who your grandparents aren’t ashamed of and who your parents constantly compare you to. Unfortunately, all that praise has gone to Seraphina’s already-bloated (she definitely caught something at school…) head. She turns every family meal into an opportunity to prove that she’s smarter than you, devouring your intellect whole. While not a zombie, Seraphina undoubtedly has an appetite for brains.
“Tell me, pleb,” she says, her nose so high in the air that you can see straight up her meticulously groomed nostrils, “do you believe that Chaucer’s contributions to literature, philosophy, or astronomy were most impressive?”
“I actually think that Chaucer was garbage,” you reply, employing your classic tactic of using humor as a defense mechanism.
“Well isn’t that… edgy,” Seraphina replies. “Pray tell, commoner: what about Chaucer was… garbage?”
“Oh, you know,” you reply, stuffing stuffing into your mouth, “row argw worwror.”
Seraphina looks at you, disgusted. Oh, wait… that’s just what her face looks like.
“I can’t believe I’m related to such philistine peasants,” she says extra-loudly, ensuring that the rest of the table will hear and admire her.
- Older Cousin and High School Bully/Wrestling Captain Ed – Consume the Meek
As you try to edge away from Cousin and Harvard Graduate Seraphina, you accidentally bump a large, soft, fatty… cousin? You look up and see Older Cousin and High School Bully/Wrestling Captain Ed. In high school, Ed was nothing but muscle. But two years of partying studying at the closest state party school that everyone from your high school goes to, and Ed’s coated his muscles with a nice layer of beer-fat.
“Chunks!” he cries, seeing you.
“Hey, Ed,” you mutter quietly.
“Man, how’s it going? You still spitting chunks whenever you go swimming?” Ed guffaws loudly, swigs a bear, and crushes the can on his head.
“I was seven, Ed,” you reply. “And it wasn’t so much the swimming as it was you punching me in the stomach and throwing me in the pool.”
“Tomato, tom-ah-to!” Ed grins, wipes potato from his mouth, and shoves your face into your plate.
You rest your face in your cranberry sauce for a moment while you compose yourself. Apparently, a little more fat had made Ed no less adept at consuming the meek’s self-esteem.
- Beloved Childhood Pet Sparky the Dog - Predatory Hunger
As you chide yourself for daring to hope that your family might have changed even a tiny bit during your time apart, you hear a bark, and rejoice. Your face flies up from its cranberry resting place.
“Sparky!” you shout, as your now-elderly childhood pet attempts to bound over to you.
Beloved Childhood Pet Sparky the Dog limps up to you with a spark in his eye.
“What’s that you’ve got for me, buddy?”
Sparky drops a dead rat onto the floor in front of you.
“Even our dog is bourgeois,” Cousin and Harvard Graduate Seraphina announces loudly to the table, turning up her nose. Huh. Maybe her nose is just always pointing up like that…?
“DOPE!” shouts Older Cousin and High School Bully/Wrestling Captain Ed as he struggles to his feet, knocking over a chair before lumbering over to Sparky. He picks up the rat and grins, holding it up for all to see.
“Who’s got dibs on the rat?” Ed shouts.
- Creepy Uncle Steve – Devour Flesh
Creepy Uncle Steve immediately looks up, dropping from his mouth the picked-clean turkey bone that he had been gnawing on.
“Still got meat on its bones?” he asks in his signature wheezy, overeager way.
“Beloved Childhood Pet Sparky the Dog took a bite out of the leg, but I think most of the torso is still good,” Older Cousin and High School Bully/Wrestling Captain Ed says slowly, examining the corpse.
“Well, in that case…” begins Creepy Uncle Steve, but then he pauses when he realizes the family has gone quiet and is looking uncomfortable. “I’m not interested!” he finishes, flashing a smile intending to make things better, but instead making them much, much worse.
As the family begins conversation again, Creepy Uncle Steve catches Ed’s eye and gestures. Ed catches on, and drops the rat corpse into Steve’s shoes by the door.
Creepy Uncle Steve always got the invite to family events, but… well… things just hadn’t been the same since the bones of Little Timmy’s pet rabbit had turned up, picked clean, alongside Steve’s turkey bones several years back.
- Creepy Aunt Priscilla – Appetite for the Unnatural
As Older Cousin and High School Bully/Wrestling Captain Ed returns to his seat as furtively as someone his length, width, and weight could, you feel a sharp pinch on your left arm.
“Ow!” you cry, jerking your arm back immediately. As was a regular occurrence at family gatherings, you’d been stabbed. By a fork, it appeared. You look up at the perpetrator.
Creepy Aunt Priscilla gazes up at you, eyes wide, perpetually open. Not once had you ever seen that woman blink.
“Shhhhh,” she says, licking your blood from her fork. She grabs your wrist with inhuman strength and brings your arm to her mouth. You struggle, but the 92-year-old woman’s iron grip is too much. A small serpent – wait, no, that was just her tongue – emerges from her dry, cracked lips and darts at your arm, lapping up the single crimson drop.
She releases your arm, smiles, and stares deep into your eyes. You suddenly notice that she has no irises.
“I know what I’m thankful for this holiday season,” she croaks. Her tongue-serpent flicks over her sandpaper lips once more. She raises the fork to her mouth and, with a sharp crack, bites off a prong.
You’ve had it. Belittled, cranberry shoved in your face, and now having your lifeblood drained by a human viper with a fork, you face the one truly responsible for your suffering: Mom.
- Mom – Ravenous Trap
“Mom, you can’t keep doing this to me!”
Your mom turns away from her conversation with Beloved Childhood Pet Sparky the Dog and faces you.
“Whatever are you talking about, darling?”
You slam your fist on the table. The family goes silent.
“Every year, it’s the same thing!” At last, your pent-up rage overflows. “I successfully avoid this freakish group of-of-of… of freaks-”
You can practically hear Cousin and Harvard Graduate Seraphina’s eyeroll.
“Unwashed street-bum,” she mutters loudly.
“-and you rope me back for the holidays with the one thing I can’t resist!”
“What’s that?” asks the woman who birthed, fed, and cared for you for eighteen years of your life.
“FOOD!” you roar. “You’ve used the fact that I’m always starving and ravenous to set a trap for me! But I’m done. I’m done being beat up and poked and- OW!”
You feel a sharp pinch as Creepy Aunt Priscilla stabs your arm again.
You narrow your eyes.
“This ends now,” you say threateningly. Your eyes blaze with colorless light and the ground begins to shake.
- Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger – Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger
“What-what are you doing?!” shouts the father who never said he was proud of you.
“Do you even know what I went to school for?” you bellow.
“You call that dump a school?” scoffs Cousin and Harvard Graduate Seraphina.
“I went for MAGIC: THE GATHERING!” The rumbling and shaking intensifies. “And I have engineered something marvelous…” You reveal a remote control and press a big red button. A wall collapses, revealing…
“A boiler room?” asks Older Cousin and High School Bully/Wrestling Captain Ed.
“Nah, I think it’s a generator,” chimes in Creepy Uncle Steve, who’s moved to the door and is reaching into his shoe.
“Behold…” you pause dramatically. “Aetherworks Marvel!”
The room collectively gasps.
“But… but that’s banned!” shouts Younger Brother and Irritating Snitch Joey. “Mom! He’s playing with banned cards again!”
The roof of the house is torn asunder. Several tentacles enter, grabbing members of your family one by one. Their screams are lost in the open sky as Ulamog (presumably) stares down at you in all of his bony facemask glory…
“Protagonist? Protagonist, can you hear me?”
You slowly stir awake. The faces of your concerned family are all looking down at you.
“What… what happened?” you ask.
“Turns out when Creepy Aunt Priscilla was satisfying her appetite for the unnatural, she accidentally stabbed you with a needle containing a dangerous toxin instead of her fork,” explained your angry, distant father.
“It wasn’t an accident,” croaks Creepy Aunt Priscilla. She smiles, and her tongue flicks over her needle.
“Hey,” says Older Cousin and High School Bully/Wrestling Captain Ed, “has anyone seen Beloved Childhood Pet Sparky the Dog?”
“Nope,” says Creepy Uncle Steve quickly. He empties his plate, dumping lots and lots of large turkey bones into the trash.
