December Days 15 - The Exchange

[silveradept]

[It's December Days time! There's no overarching theme this year, so if you have ideas of things to write about, I'm more than happy to hear them.]

So, yesterday at work, we played the gift exchange.

1. Everyone draws a number.
2. One opens a gift, then Two gets to choose whether they want to open a new gift or take what One got and send them back to get another gift. Each successive number can pick from the opened gifts in front of them or collect a new gift that's wrapped and open it.
3. Usually after a certain number of times a gift has been taken, it stops moving and stays with the person that took it the last time.
4. Optionally, One gets one last look at everything, once it's opened, and can exchange what they have for someone else's thing.

This game is a staple of many parties, and some of the fun is in determining what you can get for the dollar limit imposed on the gifts. The other fun tends to be in the good-natured thieving that goes on, assuming that you have a crowd that can handle good-natured thieving. If that's not the case, then perhaps avoid this game.

I mention this for two reasons - it's a staple of the family holiday gatherings, with a lot of ribbing that goes along with the stealing, and because this year, I ended up with a cracker / popper, which is a thing that looks kind of like a long wrapped candy with small cardboard tabs on the left and right sides of the central container.

To open a popper, it's much like a wishbone grab - one person on each end, and at the signal, both people pull on their tab. What's supposed to happen is that the central compartment pops open with a loud sound, and then the contents inside are to be played with. There's often a paper crown, a sheet of horrible puns and jokes, and a small toy of some sort inside.

Poppers are also part of the holiday tradition in the family.

The problem with living as far away from family as I do is that returning for gatherings is not as easy as hopping the train or driving up. It requires planes or multi-day driving or travel. Unlike other places with developed high speed rail, is not cheap to go home for the holidays. Which can make you feel rather lonely and out of the loop when the only person you've been celebrating with for the last few years is the other person in your house and their friends, because your circumstances and their reasons have tied you to them, rather than letting you go to your own parties and to theirs.

But, every year, you get a new number and there are new things in the pile, so here's to new traditions and those that survive the changes.

Comments

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

My wife, before meeting me, always scheduled herself to work Xmas and Thanksgiving so she didn't have to worry about going home for the holidays. It was a two day drive, so not a big deal. She didn't have that great a relationship with her sibs, and her more distant relatives are all in Scotland, so they were never in the picture.

[silveradept]

Good money to be made if you can do it.