Every Christmas, I inevitably find myself invited to someone’s home for a family-friendly Christmas party. These are the parties where, inevitably (say it like Kim Jong Il in “Team America“) we go through the ritual trading of “white elephant” gifts.
If you’re unfamiliar with this custom, it goes like this…
The hosts encourage everyone who wants to participate to bring a wrapped gift. The value is typically capped at some reasonable level so no one pulls a Michael Scott and buys an iPod.
You then go in some predetermined order, picking the gift you want… and each subsequent person chooses whether to take someone else’s gift or pick a gift from the available pool of remaining gifts.
One year, as a joke, I bought a big stick of lard and gift-wrapped it, and proceeded to take it to a friend’s party.
Lard is not quite as elegant as the advertisers would have you think…
You can imagine how much fun it was to watch people trying to figure out what it was, and folks trading and negotiating gifts until eventually one of the nicest people I know got stuck with a frozen chunk of lard as his gift.
What made it more hilarious was what happened the next year…
Unbeknownst to me, everyone at the party conspired to make sure that I got stuck with that self-same blob of year-old lard.
Bastards!