Secret Santa
Once there was an office worker who lived for Secret Santa day. All year long she sorted her fellow employees by category: sports, fashion, humor, and boobie prize. Their category would determine the present each would get, should she get them for her secret santa. Of course, categorization wasn't always so cut and dry. She kept tallies for each person, and if someone switched categories mid-season, she'd find a present that was somewhere in between their old and their new categories.
The most fun part was finding presents for under $20. All year long she would scour malls, used clothing stores, garage sales, and mail order catalogs, collecting presents for each person she could conceivably get as a secret santa.
She liked the gift-receiving part, too, though the gifts she received were never as thoughtful or as clever as her gifts to them. To make it more exciting for herself, she would choose a different personality each year and see if she could get her secret santa to buy her a gift appropriate to her faux personality. The year she pretended to love sports was the most difficult, though that is how she met Rob and married him after a whirlwind romance. (They broke up six months later at Christmastime; his gifts were not nearly thoughtful enough.)
One January, after a smashing Christmas (in which she gave Sally in marketing a smashing little black dress which must have cost hundreds originally but which she got for precisely $20 at a garage sale) she was called into her manager's office for her annual review. It was bad. The previous year she had taken on the personality of a slouchy sandbagging do-nothing in order to get a boobie prize. But now she had to pay the price. She was fired from her job of 20 years and had nowhere to turn.
After almost a year of miserable half-hearted job searching, she returned to Rob and got back together with him. She grimly donned the Sports-Lover persona for the rest of her life, and gave up the happiness of receiving thoughtful gifts. She still indulged in giving gifts to everyone she knew, of course, and she still kept herself to a fixed amount per present. Life wasn't as good as before, but she knew that it wasn't meant to last forever. Fate had given her the gift of 20 years' good Secret Santaing, and instead of being regretful she cherished those memories for the rest of her life.
The most fun part was finding presents for under $20. All year long she would scour malls, used clothing stores, garage sales, and mail order catalogs, collecting presents for each person she could conceivably get as a secret santa.
She liked the gift-receiving part, too, though the gifts she received were never as thoughtful or as clever as her gifts to them. To make it more exciting for herself, she would choose a different personality each year and see if she could get her secret santa to buy her a gift appropriate to her faux personality. The year she pretended to love sports was the most difficult, though that is how she met Rob and married him after a whirlwind romance. (They broke up six months later at Christmastime; his gifts were not nearly thoughtful enough.)
One January, after a smashing Christmas (in which she gave Sally in marketing a smashing little black dress which must have cost hundreds originally but which she got for precisely $20 at a garage sale) she was called into her manager's office for her annual review. It was bad. The previous year she had taken on the personality of a slouchy sandbagging do-nothing in order to get a boobie prize. But now she had to pay the price. She was fired from her job of 20 years and had nowhere to turn.
After almost a year of miserable half-hearted job searching, she returned to Rob and got back together with him. She grimly donned the Sports-Lover persona for the rest of her life, and gave up the happiness of receiving thoughtful gifts. She still indulged in giving gifts to everyone she knew, of course, and she still kept herself to a fixed amount per present. Life wasn't as good as before, but she knew that it wasn't meant to last forever. Fate had given her the gift of 20 years' good Secret Santaing, and instead of being regretful she cherished those memories for the rest of her life.
posted by Eric Heimburg at 10:40 AM
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