the Great Christmas Gift Swap

Friday, we had a Christmas party at the office and one of the annual traditions is a big gift swap. In the US, it might be called "Dirty Santa" or "White Elephant", but white elephants are sacred here, so we avoided that title. Anyway, you know what I am talking about, everyone gets a number, then picks from the pile of gifts or "steals" a gift from someone else. I ended up with the worst number of the lot... 2. According to our rules, #1 gets to go again at the end, so #2 picks without any good "steal" options and doesn't get to swap unless they are pilfered first. So what did I get?

A beautiful jewelry box with a lovely purple broach... A lovely gift for if I was a 60+ year-old woman, but not so much for a 33-year-old guy.

Here I am shopping it around to others, but as you can see there weren't many takers.

Above: Jiap looks over and laughs as she passes up the pin for a box in the stack. Below: Santi also passes me by with one of the 3 handcrafted lamps he had during the game.

Above: Mae Thong didn't want a little broach, she wanted a big surprise- seizing the largest gift in the stash (a plastic shelf unit), but you could have easily mistaken that for the box to carry this "6 Layer White Chocolate Cake". It was HUGE! Props to Kelly for coming up with yet another tasty treat.

Oh, by the way, Deborah mercifully stole the broach and jewelry box toward the end of the game and allowed me to do a "mercy steal" for someone else. I ended up with some ornaments.

(Note: If you are the person who brought the broach/box and are reading this, let me make this clear: the gift was a nice gift, but not for a single guy under 40. I could have kept it to give to my grandmother, but I was worried it would have broken in transport back to the US.)