And More Holiday News

django swimming
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I totally forgot to blog about the various Dirty Santa parties I have been attending. No, not Dirty Santa like that - these parties were nice and all but they weren't that exciting. Thank god. I did go out on a couple of internet dates one time with a guy who kind of looked like a young Santa Claus and while he was nice and all, I couldn't get past the picture in my head of the red suit. There are some people you just don't want to see naked. Hell, there are some people you're tempted to pay good money to in order to ensure that you will never have to see them naked and alas, when that subset intersects with the dating subset, as it inevitably will in this era of virtual everything, it's pretty much depressing for everyone involved.

Anyway, Dirty Santa is a game; in fact, it is one of those games that pretty much everyone else in the world has long since heard of and participated in as you too can discover by googling the term. What you get when you google is actually a long list of websites offering directions in varying degrees of total confusingness, so that after the first time I googled it and looked at a couple of sites I was completely unable to make heads or tails of any of the rules and decided that somebody else would simply have to tell me what to do. I did manage to figure out that you had to bring a wrapped gift that was worth up to or roughly around a certain amount of money. That was all I got, but I was not worried, figuring I would rely on A, who had of course played it, because A knows everything there is to know about group games and holiday rituals and, well, everything. And, as it turned out, it all worked fine - thanks, A!

What happens is that you bring your wrapped gift - and if you're me you get all freaked out about the purchase of said gift, because it has to be a gift that anyone attending might want yet it can't be cash or a gift card or something desirable like that because that would be cheating. Therefore you end up wandering around downtown in the rain trying to buy something that's beautiful and local and amazing and cheap and will make people go WOW and yet isn't something you could make yourself if you had infinite time and a workshop and more talent and all and then, utterly depressed, you end up buying some kind of hippie Indian shit from the head shop on the theory that, fuck it, it's Asheville. Then, again if you're me, you will also wrap up a white elephant out of the garage in a fit of last minute nerves.

ANYWAY, you wrap your crummy gift exquisitely and take that gift to the party and then everyone draws numbers and the first person gets to select a gift and open it and then the next person can either open a wrapped gift or steal the unwrapped one and so on down the line. It's actually much less confusing and much more fun than it sounds, particularly if you have enough presents for Round Two of sort of lesser but still great presents later on when everyone is kind of liquored up and less inhibited. That's how I got the Tom Jones album with the picture of him with his shirt open that looks pretty much like he has iron filings stuck all over his chest.

The first DS party was held at S' house and attended by the usual suspects, which is to say, J & K, H & Z, me, S, A, J and C. The hands down winner present, contributed by S, was a toy guitar that came complete with a baffling purple wiglet (it sort of makes the wearer look like a really psychedelic Hasidic Jew) and which got stolen no less than three times. I ended up with a bamboo cutting board and a mousepad which I desperately needed and, oddly enough, by the time we were all done, everybody had pretty much exactly what they wanted and it was totally fun. We did the same thing for work, only with less people and at Mela for lunch and it was also fun, although quieter.

So I thoroughly approve of this Dirty Santa business even if I didn't get to do the horizontal macarena with a bearded guy in a red suit. I even approve of it although - or because - I didn't, thus, end up spending way too much time and/or money frantically trying to make and/or buy amazing presents for all my amazing friends. Therefore, I heartily recommend the whole thing and if you want to know how to play, you can just google it. Or ask A.