White Elephant
Today was the office holiday party. Every year as part of the event we do a “White Elephant” gift exchange. If you are not familiar with this gag, you take about the most useless, unusual or just plain tacky item you can find, pack it in a box and wrap it up badly in Christmas paper or newspaper or duct tape. The gifts are given anonymously and the items usually come from home, but you can buy something at a store or even make something from scratch, as I did this year. All of the gifts go under the crappy artificial office Christmas tree. The overall tableau of the event is that of Christmas in a Motel 6 lobby.
Each participant in the gift exchange gets a number. When that number is called he can either open a present from under the tree or take someone else’s present if he particularly liked it (if your pick was taken by someone else, you get to open a new present). An individual gift can be “taken” three times by our rules and then the third owner gets to keep it. The gift exchange can get rather raucous and racy depending on how far people are willing to go. I’m thinking along the lines of the leg lamp in the fishnet stocking from the movie “A Christmas Story.” That would have made a great White Elephant gift. Nobody went quite that far today, but there was a framed drawing of a naked nymph in a clamshell. If it was at all offensive, it was not in any overt sexual way, but as really bad art. One really cool gift was an antique (probably 1950s) toy of a slim metal pole about sixteen inches tall on a stand with a little painted metal woodpecker that slides all the way down, making a soft “clackity clack” noise as its beak hits the metal. It’s the kind of gift that qualifies as a gag, but fetches hundreds of dollars on e-bay.
Here is the gift that I got today in our White Elephant exchange. Yes, I took it from someone else. I actually chose it. How could I resist?
And here is the gift that I gave (the original was in a nice frame). It was traded for all three times. I am so proud.
9:00:59 PM 
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