Hand and Foot & Canasta Hats

Hand and Foot is the four-deck cousin of canasta: a four-person game where each player holds a hand and a foot, the second pile picked up once the first is gone. It fills senior-center game rooms, church halls and RV park clubhouses. At the Bugbee Senior Center in White River Junction, Vermont, about 14 players gather most Thursdays at 1pm for four rounds and two to two and a half hours, and one player's verdict is "It's half luck, half skill." One blogger says the game was introduced by her husband's family and "must have been written into the marriage agreement somewhere," and a Christian Science Monitor writer put it this way: "some families have a streak of madness running through them; mine has a rash of canasta." Canasta itself reached the US in the 1950s and quickly surpassed contract bridge as the most popular card game of its day. These hats speak in that warm, deadpan, competitive voice. HAND AND FOOT and CANASTA are the plain badges. THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A FRIENDLY GAME OF CANASTA is a title already sold on tees. The rest use the game's own vocabulary: going out, which ends the round when you play or discard every card from your foot, a frozen pile, a card shark, a prenup, a Tuesday that runs to midnight, and playing at your own funeral. Every design is custom embroidered on an unstructured dad hat. A gift for whoever keeps the score sheet.