Monday, December 20, 2010

Monday's Memory: the one with the white elephant exchange

once upon a time, in that wonderful small group i was in
(before things came to light that eventually caused our necessary disbanding)
we gathered for a Christmas party, complete with a white elephant gift exchange

all of us aimed for goofy gifts.
and they were all fantastically silly

but i will never forget that when i opened the gift i had selected from the pile
(right before the laughter broke out)
my friend michael (his son is the one i now nanny for)
said calmly and dryly
"well, you can be assured that no one will want to steal THAT one."


(here's about the point where he said it, actually.  i had no idea i had photos of that moment!)


 yeah...if you can't tell, i'm holding two identical plastic bags
both of which contained a fish
the look on my face kind of says it all.

(i told the group that if they stayed at my house they would be named "cat" and "food".  thankfully i taught across the hall from a teacher who had a fish tank in her classroom...so they became extra Christmas gifts for her!)

what's the funniest gift YOU have ever received?

Photobucket

4 comments:

Brooke said...

at my family party, the directive is to bring something you want to get rid of. i ended up with an old dishtowel and a ceramic bird.

i gave our old fireplace grate :D

Heather @ Simple Wives said...

FISH? HAHAHAHA...that is the BEST white elephant gift I have ever heard!!!!

At our white elephant party, I unwrapped a roll of Toilet Paper...with a gift card stuff inside, haha. :)

HappyascanB said...

Our Sunday School class always has a Christmas party. The girls do an ornament swap and the boys do a gag gift exchange. This year, they started talking about crazy gag gifts and someone said at the youth group party this year, one box had the verse about being fishers of men and inside were 15 individually packaged live goldfish! We laughed and laughed about it! Never thought someone else would have the same idea! What a hoot!

Tim's gift was a tradition of sorts. It was a heart shaped frame ornament with a picture of one of the other guys in the class in it. It's been part of the exchange for 7 years now!

Jamie Willow said...

well, it wasn't for me, but it was pretty funny...

my brother is always trying to "get" my sister, he drew her name in the gift pool that year...and when it came time for her to unwrap her gift, she tore the paper off and it was a wooden box all nailed together and every side said "this side up"...she ended up having to get a hammer to get the nails out to eventually get to her gift. We still laugh about that one. He definitely "got" her.