My Best Piece of Holiday Advice

I have very few pieces of profound wisdom that I can offer the world that did not come from someone else, from common sense, or from listening to the “Sunscreen Song” about 800 times during the ‘90s.

But I do have this:

Make it your goal to go home from the annual “Dirty Santa/Yankee Swap” game with the worst possible gift.

I know, I know. Where did you read that first: The Bible or Shakespeare? Seriously, though, this is a philosophy that struck me more than a decade ago, and I have sought to implement ever since.   Whether it has done me any good is, of course, debatable, but since I have very few epiphanies I can say with confidence are completely organic to my own experience, I’ve decided to take this one and run with it.

A dozen years ago or so, when I was at a work Christmas party where a gift-stealing game was one of the centerpieces of the annual event.  (I should add that, despite my best efforts, I tend to be the bearer of less-popular and less-frequently stolen gift. I realize that bringing alcohol to the exchange would be the easiest remedy to this poor track record, but since I don’t drink – I say and do enough stupid stuff without help – I tend not to want to go that route.)  This year, however, I had found a kitchen gadget that was normally twice as much as the spending limit, marked down to 50% off.

I was delighted when one of our young interns selected the gift and her face immediately lit up when she saw it was something practical and legitimately useful for her as she was just beginning to equip her grown-up apartment. The gift was quickly stolen by another intern who had a similar reaction.  But then it was nabbed by a much older and more well-established co-worker, and then an executive, until it was finally retired.  I remember feeling a little annoyed that people who could have easily forked over the cash for the kitchen gadget at full price were fighting over it (good-naturedly, of course) while an intern for whom that item would actually have been a really nice item, was left with something like a shower radio in the end.  (Which is kind of cool, admittedly.)

It got me thinking.

That was the same year when one junior employee brought his out-of-town girlfriend, and she selected one of the inevitable gag gifts in the bunch: a hideous Christmas ornament of some local celebrity that made the nightmarishLucille Ball sculpture look downright complimentary.  I remember how quietly she sat, smiling and watching the rest of the festivities for the course of the game, but obviously knowing there was no way she was going to be pulled into any of the socializing-through-gift-swapping the rest of us were happily engaged in – myself included.

As I watched her, I couldn’t help but think that all of our bids to get the best gift really missed the point of the whole game, which was draw people in and create a fun banter between people and their partners. The hope was that we would leave the party knowing each other a little better – a kind of holiday team-building exercise. But it didn’t really work that way.

I emerged with a set of beautiful goblets in a hard-fought victory against a woman in accounting, but I couldn’t shake the disappointment on the young woman’s face – not disappointment about her gift, but disappointment that she was not going to be able to participate in the engagement that everyone else was enjoying.  At the end of the party, I approached her and asked if we could trade gifts. I knew it was too late, but that hideous ornament now leers at me from our tree every year as a reminder of what I decided that night:  My goal, from that point forward, would be to leave every gift exchange with the worst possible gift.

I’ve tried it since then, with other companies I’ve gone on to work for, with small groups from church, with book clubs, with holiday block parties – and it’s hard to describe the degree of satisfaction it to know that you are there with the subversive goal of coming out on bottom. 

I want to make it clear that I am IN NO WAY suggesting that games like Dirty Santa/Yankee Swap are harmful and should be banned from holiday parties for any other kind of overly-sensitive nonsense – they are fun and spirited and always, always hilarious.  But if we are committed to the idea that Christmas or Hanukkah are actually about commemorating sacred events in our faiths’ histories, why not practice that across the board?

Nothing in those exchanges is ever anything I couldn’t buy for myself, if I actually wanted it, and I suspect the same is true for you, too.  The much bigger reward is finding a way to pull people in and to give people who are just starting out a better return on their $20 gift-limit buy-in than maybe I get.

Of course, there is no good way to share something like this without sounding like you are holding yourself up as a model of virtue and best choices, but those of you who know me know that when I am trying to be intentionally self-congratulatory, I go WAY bigger than this. And I realize that I’m a total wet blanket by trying to bring some kind of moral lesson into one of the most lighthearted and silliest traditions around the holidays. But, you know, you asked for my best season advice so…

Oh, wait.  You didn’t ask. Well, in that case, I probably am just sharing this to feel better about myself.  (But seriously, try the worst-gift-in-the-exchange thing this year…and if you find yourself in a gift exchange with me and I go home with your gift, please don’t take it personally.)