que pasa

So I’m home for Christmas and I convinced my small group to have a white elephant gift exchange at our Christmas lunch party. The idea came from my bro - kudos to him. Basically everyone has to bring a gift, but the gift has to be something that you already own but do not want. Of course you can’t bring used stuff or totally worthless things, and it has to look presentable. You have to wrap it up so that nobody knows what it is.

All the gifts are put in a pile and you draw cards to decide the order of gift-picking. So the first dude gets to choose his present. You can shake it, roll it, do whatever to it, so long as it does not damage the thing inside. Then when he has picked his gift, he has to open it for everybody to see. The second dude has the choice of snatching the first guy’s gift, or picking a new gift from the pile. The third guy gets to snatch the gifts the preceding people have picked or pick a new one. And so on. If your gift gets snatched by someone else, then you have to pick a new gift from the stack, can’t snatch somebody else’s, otherwise it would be total chaos (can you imagine?)

So anyway, my bro’s small group did it and it sounded really fun, so there really shouldn’t be anything to worry about when my small group does it, right? Wrong. Because my small group has crazy and mean people… they bring really white elephants to the party.

Like Teachers’ Day presents (i.e. cute and colorful but absolutely useless table ornaments i.e. clutter) little kids save up their recess money to buy hoping really hard that their favourite teacher will love it. Like some random bamboo pen caddy. Like an ashtray that coughs “No smoking, ahem ahem, no smoking, ahem ahem” when you lift up the matchbox from it. Like a clay mini-flower pot display item. Like a pot with a fake apple tree in it that looks so fake that it looks like a kum-kuat (looks like orange lime fruits) plant. Whatever, it was really bad, some of the gifts that were exchanged. Should have expected this from my people.

There were some good gifts though, like an expresso mug set. I wanted to snatch that one, but the person had to leave right before it was my turn. Damn! So I snatched a harmless yellow photo frame, which was snatched immediately from me. Damn again. I ended up with this flower pot thingy. Sigh.

Pretty sure some of these white elephants are going to come back next year. Oh man oh man oh man. But damn it’ll be fun!