Yankee Swap Disasters and General Complains about Oprah

I ran the school Holiday Party for the second year in a row. Before I delve further into the subject of the party itself, let me comment upon the fact that I'm calling it "The Holiday Party" instead of "The Christmas Party." Are we becoming (or indeed, have we already become) overly P.C.? I don't know, but I don't see any harm in asking people to generalize their greetings to those they don't know well or to large groups of people. After all, we don't all celebrate the same holidays and we aren't all followers of the same religion. I guess an argument could be made in either direction. Screw it and say Merry Christmas to everybody, or play it safe and keep the greeting nondenominational. I guess after my years of working in public schools and being so preconditioned to keep things neutral and noncontroversial, I have moved more toward the P.C. end of the spectrum.

Anyway, enough about that.

More about the staff party.

I made the decision, two years ago, to help another colleague run the party. She had been running it for years, and I always felt badly that she had to do all the work alone. It really is a thankless job. It really is a pain in the neck, too. The constant reminders and chasing people down gets exhausting. The stress surrounding trying to finalize numbers to give to the restaurant and the realization that somebody is eventually going to try to stiff you is pretty stressful.

Things went smoothly. A good time was had by all and I only had three people try to stiff me out of the cash. Thank god I'm not too proud to conduct a full shake down, because this is exactly what occured on all three occasions. If any shame will be experienced, it will not be on my end. I mean, come on, who should be more ashamed, someone who is sitting there with a full plate of food that they have no intention of paying for, or the one whose pocket their full plate of food is potentially going to come from? I think we can all mutually agree that shame shall be appropriately visited upon the freeloader.

I just don't get this stuff.

As always, there was a Yankee Swap at the party. I presided over this mayhem, but not before establishing some very important ground rules.

1. Unlimited swapping of gifts. (It became necessary to establish this rule several years back when a woman who received a couple of lottery scratch tickets insisted that there was a three-trade limit on any given gift. Funny, she had obtained these tickets on the third switch. I had never heard of that rule before. Since then, the "unlimited swapping" policy has been stated both up front, on the initial party invitation, as well as before the swapping actually takes place at the party.)

2. You must keep all gifts in full view throughout the duration of the swapping. (Explicit clarification of this rule was born of a colleague's attempt to thwart me from getting her Crate and Barrel Kitchen Towel set. When I started looking for it and could not locate it, I had to ask for it several times. Eventually, the woman begrudgingly pulled it out of her bag, but complained OUT LOUD that since I didn't have a husband to cook for, I should not take her towels. I was never so happy to rip the cool gift of a woman's hands in my life as I was at that moment. Just for the record...I gave her a brick of a fruit cake it place of her towels.)

3. You must not scratch lottery tickets if you get them as they can be traded throughout the process.

4. The person who draws number one at the beginning has the ultimate and final swap upon conclusion of gift selection.

The whole point of Yankee swaps seems to be lost at most Christmas parties. I guess I think that the idea is to buy a relatively decent gift (unless a joke gift swap has been specified), and to have some fun while doing the swap. I don't understand why some people go out and purposely buy shit gifts, and then of course, they are the ones who end up taking the nicest gifts home. I brought a cute little centerpiece from Crate and Barrel, and ended up getting some horrible flea market quality rose sculpture. What the hell was that? Where would I even put it? Could it have possibly met the ten dollar requirement? I mean, really. It was the ugliest, most useless, stupidest thing I had ever seen in my life. I was going to leave it there in the restaurant and not even give it the effort it would require to carry it home.

Some woman I work with said she thought it was beautiful. Honest to Christ I thought she was joking and I almost laughed. Luckily I got it under control and fought back the laugh. I gave her the thing. I mean, really. I would have just ended up throwing it away. I couldn't even be bothered!

I was pretty disgusted, though. For once, will I end up with a decent Yankee Swap? Every year I think I'm going to buy some crappy gift to put in there, but I just end up getting something decent, and then getting screwed in the end!

Anyway, I was happy just to end up with enough money to cover the bill and a willing pawn upon whom to dump the tacky sculpture. Nobody got drunk and embarrassed themselves and nobody got fired. So, all in all, I guess it was a good day.

As for the Oprah business...

I generally respect Oprah on many levels.

She is an extremely generous and compassionate woman who has shed so much light on the sufferings of people around the world. She is very public about her charity work, and people critisize her for this, saying that she is too self-congratulatory. I think, however, that there is an excellent reason for her to be very high profile in her acts of charity; she is doing these things in full public view to enlighten people as to the plights of the have-nots of the world. She knows that she has such a huge viewing audience and she knows that she has the power to bring this most important message to them, so I'm convinced that even though there might be some egotism involved in her actions, that ultimately, she is doing the right things for the right reasons.

There is also no denying that she looks beautiful. She has done so much work to get healthy and in shape. She's gorgeous.

The thing that drives me nuts about her is that she is such a name dropper. When she has "regular people" in her show, she is lovely. When she has famous people as guests, she's obnoxious. She is such a kiss ass. Sometimes I think she cannot believe how famous she, herself, is, and that she feels this need to advertise her friendships with other famous people.

Jamie Foxx was on her show yesterday and I caught the last few minutes of it. I have to admit that I have pretty much only seen him in Ray. He was amazing playing Ray Charles. However, on this particular installment of Oprah, his musical talents, as opposed to his acting, were being highlighted.

I was surprised at how much I didn not enjoy his music. Jamie Foxx is an extremely handsome man, and he seems bright and articulate, so it was interesting to hear him speak and talk about his musical experiences. However, when he set in to sing, I was utterly bored. His voice is fine. He seems to have a great stage presence. He interacted nicely with the crowd. He seemed to have all the right buttons in the right places. So, what's the problem? As I said, he was boring. His songs sound like these cheesy, contrived ballads, the lyrics of which an 8th grade girl would write in her poetry notebook. He likens his daughter to an angel and sings about how, when it comes to his romantic capabilities, "missionary position" is not in his repertoire. I'm not making this up. These were the lyrics. How freakin' cheesy. I wanted to run out and grab a sleeve of Ritz crackers and a bottle of white to go with that cheese!

As I said, I was disappointed. I would have expected greater things from a man who did such a masterful job of channeling Ray Charles on the big screen.

Whatever.

As for the business about Oprah herself, she just annoys me sometimes, is all I'm saying.

Why won't my spell check work??