Behold the white elephant!

The Hero and Princess are freshly back from the Midwest, where they visited numerous of the Hero's relatives and participated in various Christmas traditions, including eating 30 pounds of chocolate and seeing how many people could be squeezed into our host's living room (Answer: 53 pre-chocolate, 41 1/2 post-chocolate).


Each year the Hero's family also traditionally holds a white elephant gift exchange. Most participants search thoughtfully for the perfect gift to bring, defined as "the item in my house or garage or storage unit that I most abhor and would delight in passing along to some unsuspecting friend or family member."


For some people, this item jumps right out at them: It is the gift they received at the white elephant exchange LAST year. In our family exchange, some items have made an appearance every year since 1984. 


For other people, choosing an appropriate white elephant gift is a bit more difficult. ANYTHING in their house could qualify.


Since the Hero and I come to this gift exchange from a great distance, we carefully and thoughtfully choose a NEW item that is purchased about five minutes before the exchange is set to take place. The Hero's strategy is to buy something he likes so that there will be at least one gift that he can live with. This item is also generally something other participants would NOT enjoy getting, such as an advanced textbook on the theory of orthogonalized factors and vector field partitioned matrices, thereby guaranteeing that no one will steal it from him.


Because yes: participants in the gift exchange are allowed to steal a gift already chosen by another participant. Sometimes an item is so popular we almost come to blows over it. This year that item was a set of four Peanuts drinking glasses, which remarkably matched not only each other but also the box they were wrapped in (because we had just bought it at Target five minutes before).


Coming in close behind the glasses in popularity were 64 rolls of Scott toilet paper. I confess that this item also was donated by us, and must stress that it was a completely NEW item, in the sense that it came right from Target and not from our own personal stash of toilet paper. So, although technically it was not a used item, which white elephant gifts usually are, the recipient generously overlooked this particular breach of the rules.


I picked out this item while the Hero was on the phone at Target, and when he hung up he marveled that I hadn't found a BIGGER box of toilet paper. Luckily the Target employees seem very used to customers doing odd things, and did not question why we were attempting to fit a ginormous box of toilet paper into a gift bag.


One item that did NOT go over well was a large wooden jewelry display case, whose recipient spent the better part of the exchange trying to interest the other participants in stealing it from her. "Now, remember, folks, you can have this LOVELY, broken jewelry case for FREE!" she said each time it was someone's turn to choose a gift.


In the end the Hero agreed to give this recipient a book he had received in the exchange, on Marilyn Monroe, as long as the trade did NOT involve his having to take the jewelry case in return. We are not sure what the eventual fate of the case was, but we fully expect to see it at next year's gift exchange.