Tuesday, December 23, 2008

The Infamous Yankee Swap (aka white elephant gift exchange)

Last week, the Thursday night group decided to do our ride with lights on the bikes and to follow the ride with a potluck and gift exchange.
Seeing as eating tends to be one of the key ingredients with this group, the potluck definitely didn’t disappoint. We had fresh lumpia, chicken curry, fried rice and who knows what else….pretty sure I took in way more calories than I burned during the ride. (which is pretty much par for the course)

Next came the infamous Yankee Swap. You know this one, it’s where you bring a gift that doesn’t suck, you all take turns opening gifts, some of which are pretty cool, people have the option of stealing from each other and in the end you hope you get a number that allows you not to get stuck with the gift that does suck….
At least that’s how I remembered it…..

Turns out this group doesn’t do it that way. Everyone brought cool gifts and the challenge, when it would be my turn, would be deciding whether I wanted to steal one of several cool gifts that had already been opened or open something new in the hopes that it was even cooler.

Evidently Jack had the same idea and unfortunately (or fortunately, I’m not going to pretend I know the answer to that) he chose to pick an unopened gift and got the one gag gift in the bunch. At least I’ve been telling myself it was a gag…..if someone brought it thinking there was someone in the group that wanted that….well, I guess I just don’t know any of these people well enough….

(As a side note - even the gag gift came with a nice bottle of champagne, so maybe it wasn't a gag....)

So, now seeing that there was indeed potential for this to turn out less than perfect, I decided to steal a gift. (One in the hand two in the bush and all that) I ended up with a very nice bottle of wine and a baggie of homemade toffee......

All in all a very fun evening and even though I have yet to take my new bike on a real ride it’s always good to get out for an hour or so….even if I did stay on the pavement.
(PS don't even ask about the red velvet thong......some of us are still trying to come to grips with that one....)

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