By Wally WachterRetired Herald Managing Editor
T HE SUDDEN letdown after a hectic holiday season annually turns us into ``couch potatoes.'' And we struggle to cope with the dull and depressing period of inactivity.
This year the wave of frigid weather has made shut-ins of most of us. If it wasn't for television and VCRs and the telephone, we would die of boredom. A movie rental outlet in the valley, whose shelves are virtually empty, admitted it had rented out nearly 4,000 movies last weekend. Multiply that by the scores of other movie rental businesses in the area and you will know what most people are doing to shake the doldrums.
Marketers of parlor games have realized how little we have to do, so they come out this year with some of the older games that we had stashed away years ago. Among them is ``Clue,'' in which you have to solve a murder, detecting the killer, the weapon used and the room in which the crime occurred.
The popularity of the TV show ``Jeopardy'' has kept the home version of the game popular, too.
The old word game ``Scrabble'' keeps coming out, now with elevated seams around the squares to keep the letter tiles in place. There also is a miniature version that can be used during auto travel by anyone but the driver.
Also noted is a rebirth in the popularity of jigsaw puzzles. Last year, the craze seemed to be three-dimensional ones. The buildings that were erected hardly made an attractive permanent fixture and the work involved to solve them caused a dilemma. They were consigned to their boxes.
Among my Christmas gifts this year was a jigsaw puzzle depicting several hundred baseball players in various poses, group team players, a solid-colored baseball glove, an assortment of 10 stitched baseballs, plus a box of spilled Crackerjack. And of course, all of the pieces are cut the same so they fit anywhere. If the cold spell lasts until next Christmas, there is enough of the puzzle to fill my idle hours.
Things got so bad recently that someone hauled out a game of Trivial Pursuit. Remember that? It was a parlor game that took the country by storm more than a decade ago, then was consigned to a remote closet as the novelty wore off. The game tests the memories of participants, taking them back to the days of our childhood in search of the answers. Today's Trivial Pursuit answers were our current events.
Our indoor entertainment when we were young was of a far different variety. The television and radio void was filled by reading. The competitive games were the ones we devised or concocted on our own.
One of our favorites was pitching canning-jar rubbers, aiming to hook them onto a board with protruding nails on a wall across the room. We fashioned the board ourselves from scrap lumber. Each nail on the board had a point value, marked underneath with a heavy pencil. We aimed to ring the nails with the highest points.
Another game that tested our abilities and precision was placing a glass milk bottle between our feet, and from an erect position, dropping clothespins to see how many we could get into the bottle. It was test of real skill.
Sailing playing cards across the room, trying to land them into an old hat, was another invented pastime.
The favorite table game was checkers. Every household had a checker board which was always busy during the winter months. The more intense competitors used it for chess.
For more than two participants, the game was Parcheesi. It was a classic game from ancient times that still is played in some circles today.
Chinese checkers hit the market when we were still quite young and provided a welcome change from the other games.
We were teen-agers when Monopoly took the country by storm. We used to spend hour upon hour selling, buying and losing properties while trying to build up play-money fortunes. The game is making a comeback, fascinating many of today's younger set.
Dominoes was another of our popular household games. Today they are used mostly in chain-reaction, collapsing walls in television commercials. Almost every home had a set of dominoes. Irregular patterns, sometimes extending over the entire table top, could be formed by matching tiles that showed the same number of dots.
We used dominoes to build structures, like pyramids, which we could blow over with the slightest breath.
The games we played kept us active enough that the indoor season was gone before we even realized it. We didn't need TV or Trivial Pursuit.
I have great respect for that latter game. I, like many others, regard it as a contest where I know the answers to all of the questions asked of my opponents, but when my turn comes, my mind goes blank.