Holiday Lunch
My office is hosting their annual holiday lunch today. It is a lunch / party that starts at 12:30pm at Cafe Bizou, a restaurant near to our office that has a preselected menu, wine at the tables and holiday music in the air. There is a couple of prizes given away to the lucky few who have their names drawn out of a hat at the end of the meal and then we all head back to the office for a Yankee gift swap.
In case any of you have not heard of the Yankee swap, everyone brings a wrapped gift without a tag and it is placed in a pile. Then, everyone takes a number (1 through however many people there are) and the person with #1 picks first and unwraps the gift in front of everyone so that they can see what it is. Then #2 can either steal #1’s gift or pick a new one to unwrap, and so on and so forth until all the gifts are unwrapped.
What is fun about this game is that the spending limit is usually low, something around $10-15. Depending on how creative people can be with spending that amount money, the gifts can be either really cheesy or something everyone really wants. That is where the stealing comes into play; as long as there is at least one “hot” item then it will get stolen left and right.
After all the gifts are unwrapped, the person with #1 can look at all the gifts one last time and decide to either steal someone else’s gift or keep the one they have. When drawing numbers, you want to be either #1 or the highest number possible so that you have the chance to do some stealing before the game is over.
Our office really looks forward to the holiday lunch as well as the Yankee gift swap. The past three years, management let us go home after the gift swap was done–fingers crossed!
I love a good Yankee Swap and have three scheduled for three different parties: one for work at the daycare, one for a sister and her family party, and one for a party we attend with my husband’s friend’s family. All should be a blast. I hope I get either the #1 or the higher numbers. Last year, I was able to steal a chair message. Really wonderful! Have a totally fab time at your party, Nicki!