Every December, we invite a small group of friends to join us for an energetic Christmas gathering. This celebration has evolved over the years and now has its own long-standing traditions. Those traditions range from tasty to tacky… and sometimes borderline nasty. Here are a few of them.
Dinner is served. This time it came in the form of blackened chicken pasta, provolone and salami salad, cheesy breadsticks, chocolate cake, and buttermilk pie from Magleby’s. The food they provided seemed ample enough to feed a mass much larger than our little crowd.
Games are played. Common among them are pool, shuffleboard, Just Dance, and ping pong. I love Just Dance even though it tends to repellently jiggle everything the good lard gave you.
We go around the world. A few matches of Around the World involving everyone are a standard at our Christmas party, although most of us don’t have the ping pong skills to even go around the net.
Christmas sweaters, mostly of the ugly variety, are worn. (Is there any other variety?)
And, of course, a white elephant exchange game is played. In our version, nothing is opened until the end. We like our guests to fight over the boxes that inevitably end up containing old socks or something with Justin Bieber’s face on it.
This year, I did add one new diversion to the merriment. I brought my camera equipment and took some shots of any attendees that desired them. I’m not entirely sure if I will do this again. It ate up too much time and it was hard to focus on my photography with so many distractions swirling around me. Still, it’s not every day you get a picture of Jeremy in tight sweats and antlers… oh wait, it is.
Cheers to the tacky-sweater-sporting and outrageous-present-begetting gang that joined us this year. Thanks to them, Santa’s got a brand new bag, a bean bag, and moose knuckles, in a miraculous feat of science, have been transplanted onto reindeer. I’d say the party was a success.