Last December, the company I was working for at the time had its annual holiday party. Usually I end up skipping these. My reasoning is: why would I want to spend my free time hanging out with the people I already see every day at work? But this time I decided to go, particularly because of the Yankee Swap.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with this custom, here it is in a nutshell. Everybody at the party brings in a wrapped gift. There's usually an expected price range that they advise people to use (e.g., "The value of the gift should be somewhere around $10"). Then, after a long system of trading the wrapped items, then unwrapping them and trading some more, everybody ends up leaving with one of the other gifts. This is easier than having 20 people each trying to buy 19 presents for the other 19 people.
Different people have different ways of doing the trading process. Though here's one typical method you might see. Let's say you have 20 people at the party. The numbers 1 through 20 are written on slips of paper and put into a hat, then each person pulls a number. This determines the order. Person #1 gets to pull a random present from the pile. Then person #2, and so on. Once everybody has a present, person #1 gets to swap it with somebody else in the cirlce. Then it's person #2's term to do the same, and so on. THEN the presents are unwrapped, and there's another round of swapping. At some point there's a round where if it's your turn and you wish to keep your present instead of swapping, you can do so, but then the whole game ends and everybody is stuck with what they have. In almost EVERY Yankee Swap I've ever been in, I ended up being the one who stopped the game. Weird.
So...what was my gift? We were told in the email that it could be a "serious" gift or it could be a "gag" gift. It just couldn't be of negative value (e.g., trying to give your car's parking ticket to somebody else so that the receiver would have to pay). Was this a hot opportunity to pawn off some of my junk? YOU BET!
The gifts at the Yankee Swap that night were pretty varied. A bottle of wine. A sled. An office chair that somebody wrapped. mp3 players. Another bottle of wine. An entire ham, frozen. A pair of DVDs (Definitely Maybe, Ocean's 13). An ergonomic back pillow. A mechanical bubble-blowing gnome (the bubbles blew out its asshole). A jar filled with M&Ms and some gift certificates. MadLibs. A weird art statue of a hand giving the peace sign. And then there was mine: a box filled with about 30 VHS movies.
What happened? Find out tomorrow...
