Secret Santa, Office Style

Once again, I consider myself lucky to work with a great bunch of people.  We did our Secret Santa christmas exchange today, which generally has two parts.. opening the gifts, then trying to figure out who bought yours.  I was a little worried about my own choice this year.  The guy whose name I got, well, we have some unfortunate history.  Living in a small town, this is not a rare occurence.  Hell it's pretty much guaranteed to not six, but more likely 2 degrees of separation.

At any rate, myself and who we'll call Mr. R (as in Recipient) have the unfortunate history of having gone to high school together, and we were not exactly what you'd call bestest buddies.  I think it'd be pretty safe to say we hated each other.  He was mean to me, and I can admit, I was a pretty malicious bitch to him as well.

I am not proud.

So roughly 2-3 years ago, Mr. R comes to work with us, which was pretty awkward for me.  I decided rather than get all weird, I'd take the mindset that "Hey, high school was 10 years ago.  I've grown up in that time, it's entirely possible he has too."  Thankfully, I've not been wrong about that, but I think the concern may have been mutual, because for a long long time around the office, we were excruciatingly polite to one another, to the point that it's kind of funny to look back on now.

So, gift-buying for someone with whom you once shared a mutual loathing can be harrowing.  Humorous gifts are tricky because what you think is funny could be construed by another as a passive-agressive declaration of war.  Or maybe I just overthink.  Anyway,   I think I did okay with bike-themed buttons.  Not my most inspired gift idea, and it would have been more effective if they had gotten here in time for the exchange, but Canada Post is an imperfect institution.

Myself, I was gifted with a set of guitar strings (with bonus decal! more stickers for Juicy Fruit!) and a bag of little round chocogasm balls.. I mean Lindor chocolates.  I had a hard time guessing who my gifter was, since i think it's almost common knowledge that I play guitar, but through the process of elimination it was eventually figured out.

MY guitar strings are celebrity endorsed.. are yours?

There was a bacon theme with the gifts this year, with at least four people receiving bacon-themed gifts.  My personal favorite was the bacon T-shirt one girl recieved.  Keep in mind my T-shirt fascination.

The first year I was with this company, we did the gift exchange, and I made a royal ass of myself.  At this point, I had been doing the weight watcher thing for about 8 months and had lost about 25 lbs, through busting my ass.

So I was admittedly less than thrilled to have been gifted with what was possibly the biggest motherfucking tin of cookies I had ever seen in my entire life.  Pretty and decorative, and yummy but holy shit, this tin was GINORMOUS.  There must have been 500 cookies in the damn thing.  Really?

I tried to be gracious about it, but I was admittedly not doing a good job.  Part of me wondered if my gifter was some insensitive thoughtless person just went "Oh, I got the fat chick.  Fat chicks like cookies, I'll just get cookies."  So when I found out that my gifter was a co-worker who I actually like and respect a lot, I felt like a complete assbag because A) he was sitting right behind me as I made my not so-successful attempt at graciousness; and B) because this person would not have given cookies for lack of any better idea, but would have because to them, cookies would be THE BEST GIFT EVER.  So yeah, I've felt kind of bad for that ever since.

If you stumble across this, I'm a jackass, my apologies.

Oddly enough, I'm trying to remember who I had to buy for that first year, and I've been drawing a total blank.

Posted in response to a post by Aunt Becky at Mommy Wants Vodka.  Go, Read, and Love.