Thursday I taught all day and babysat till late. When I got home around 11 pm, I started baking for the holiday party the next day. I made cookies till 2 am, and then finally went to sleep, only to wake up at 6-something to go right back to the high school and teach 2nd period, meet with a client I did an editing job for, and then hurry off to the party.
It was all I could do to put on my dangly Santa earrings and grab my tin of cookies. In fact, I was so exhausted that I burst into spontaneous tears while talking to a friend/co-worker at the party. D-e-l-i-r-i-o-u-s, I tell you.
Turns out, though, that only 6 of the 40-ish folks at the Community Works holiday party actually wore ugly sweaters. I guess everyone else was too freakin' tired, like me . . . or else all the hipsters in Oakland scooped up the ugly Christmas sweaters from the thrift stores cause they're ironic & cool.
These were the contestants:
my boss, the E.D., is the fifth from the left in blue
but she kinda doesn't count cause her sweater isn't really ugly
the very clear winner
If only I'd had my aunt Pat ship me some of her Christmas sweaters ahead of time! She and I were discussing this last night, and she said that the Christmas sweaters she wears now (with Santas, etc.) are more "fashionable" than the 80's ones she used to wear (poinsettia vests, etc.). I told her that we needed to be realistic, here . . . no Christmas sweater is ever "fashionable."
So what do y'all think about White Elephant gift exchanges? I love the idea of them, but I've run into the same problem over the years with the whole rotating gift exchange thing: some people bring good, serious gifts, and other people bring ridiculous stuff no one wants. Ultimately, I guess it's just important that everyone's on the same page?
I always bring a serious gift (I brought a handmade table runner, earrings, and a turquoise necklace from Guatemala), but I feel like most people bring dumb shit laying around their house (I got a wrapped up Hershey's bar, which I promptly gave to another co-worker). And while I can condone that if it's *really* funny, most of the time I think it just becomes someone else's trash. What's your take on white elephant exchanges?
(As a side note, I can't hear "white elephant" without thinking of Hemingway's very intense short story "Hills like White Elephants," so maybe that screws it up for me as well. Ha).