[Steppes] "White Elephant" gift exchange

[Jay Rudin]

It might be a good idea if people understand that the gift exchange is a rather silly game, and here are the rules.

Everyone who brings a gift will draw a number out of a hat.  In order, we will each choose a gift.

The joker in the deck is that you can either choose a present still under the tree and unwrap it, or you can choose somebody else's gift, and then they get to choose again.

A given gift can only be stolen twice.  Once it's taken by a second person, it's out of the game.

Some of the gifts will be useful or fun; some will be awful, and some will be in between.  The reasonable limits are that you need to be prepared to justify the gift you bring to the morally uptight parents of the eleven-year-old who might get it.

It's a good time to pass on that useful SCA item that doesn't match your current persona, or that fit you twenty pounds ago, or that's used in an activity you no longer do.  But it's also a good time to pass on that outrageous item you aren't willing to admit you own.

Nobody has to play.  If it doesn't sound fun, don't bring a gift to it.  (And it's still fun to watch.  People start *caring* about who's going to wind up with the Three Stooges clock.)

Robin of Gilwell / Jay Rudin

P.S.  A note to newer members.  In our period, Yuletide gifts were exchanged, if at all, at Twelfth Night, so the real gifts that we bring to our friends will happen at our event on January 2, not at the Christmas party.

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