Cousin's Christmas

For years, the Anderson family-at-large gathered at the lake cabin for Christmas. After Mom and Pops moved to Ft Worth, the Christmas get-together moved there, too, and evolved into the Cousin's Christmas - Cora and Leon's children, families thereof, and all cousins, near cousins, and anyone foolish enough to be friends of anyone in that group. Kinship-wise, it's loosely defined on purpose; one can never have enough family, and Christmas sure beats funerals for getting everyone together.

There is usually a food theme, which we mostly ignore and bring whatever is our favorite dish at that time, and a gift theme for the exchange. We do the draw numbers and each person in turn picks a gift from the stack, or steals an already opened gift. There has been a broad range of gift themes, from books to music, to things made from wood, etc. Some themes work better than others, and the quality of gifts has varied, accordingly.

This year the gift theme was White Elephant. What gift have you received that you really, really want to re-gift? And as you would expect, the class of gifts really matched the theme. We took a candle and holder, which was a heavy base with two cherubs holding up the candle - sort of like Atlas holding up the world (and almost as heavy). Our second gift was the dinosaur costume that Mom made years ago; she would wear it when she taught her dinosaur unit, and I even wore it once at an IBM sales meeting. I'm sure it was to illustrate some point regarding marketing computers, but for the life of me I can't remember it.

And what did we get, in turn? Mom first got some Roy Rogers TV episodes on DVD, which for some strange reason someone took from her. She then stole a white elephant - really - a cute stuffed plush toy from IKEA - (which she then gave to Taylor, Melissa's nine-year old daughter).

Me? Check this out.



These are staplers. Hot. Pink. Staplers that take teeny, tiny little staples (good luck finding those in the office supply). I know these were re-gifted, because they showed up at this same gift exchange last year. And will they be re-re-gifted next year? Count on it. Next year's theme is "Tools" and if these aren't tools I don't know what is.