Some Christmas gifts

There are some Christmas things I want to share. These are a few gifts I received and a couple of things I gave. I received the last one last weekend.

The first one is something I got from a white elephant exchange. This was with people at the Long Beach Newman group. It was a $5 limit and I looked for the best gift I could. However, many of the other people brought items that were just horrible. Many of the gifts were funny as long as other people got stuck with them. A few examples included an electric toothbrush with stickers to customize (which was pretty cool), a DVD for a movie that no one had hear of (that we all then watched and made fun of), a box of tampons, a horrible book someone re-gifted from last year, and a box of English muffins.

The gift I brought was one of only two gifts stolen the maximum number of times. I was very happy my kit to bake chocolate cakes in mugs was appreciated. There were 16 people and I had a good position; I was the twelfth to pick. All of the opened gifts were so bad I chose to open one of the remaining wrapped ones. It was a good choice.

While the person who brought the Spam probably thought it was a gag gift, I am a big fan of all things made from pig. I even made Spam musubi a couple of days later in honor of the Spam.

My next gift was from the Red Cross. It is an ornament or stand alone hanging thing. It is made of metal and reads American Red Cross on one side and hope on the other.

This last gift is from a secret Santa exchange with The Group (AKA The Vietnamese Crew). Terrance and Erin where in town after their trip to Indonesia. They also shared pictures of their wedding (which Brandon joked was a hipster wedding). For the gift exchange, I was a horrible person and did not put anything on my wishlist. However, I did send a message a week after the deadline suggesting something related to making cocktails would be good. Erin had a good idea what I liked since she got this gift before I made my suggestion. These two books are about making drinks and some food to pair with them.

I drew Chris with the beard and bought him a laptop case and book light. It was easy to buy him stuff because he had a wishlist. I brought a cooler full of alcohol to the gathering and made people A.M.F.s.

One of the fun things about having a blog is linking to posts I wrote earlier. For example, I can link to my A.M.F. recipe instead of repeating it. The same post also has pictures of visits to zoos. The first picture is from 2008, but I saw all of the people in it within the last month.