No one knows quite why these parties are called “white elephant parties”, but regardless, they’re a hoot. We went to our friends’ house tonight for their annual Christmas party. Every year the crowd seems to get bigger; this year there were almost fifty of us crammed into the basement.
The challenge of a white elephant gift is that it should be something that’s interesting and sort of cool, but also somewhat cheesy and dumb. It’s a tough balance to strike. After a suggestion from Alex, we decided that our first gift would be a nice towel that was conveniently labeled to avoid any awkwardness after your shower.
Our second gift was a cool reindeer oven mitt with a matching holiday cooking apron. Since it was actually a decent gift, we had to spice it up a bit with some mystery. We whipped up a batch of instant mashed potatoes and mixed in some black beans:
Throw them on a pan…
… Then cook for about 20 minutes to make something that looks somewhat like chocolate-chip cookies:
We put them into a nice cookie tin and added them to the gift. At the party, we sat back to see who opened our gift and what would happen to the cookies. Our friend Mark picked it, but he was immediately suspicious because they didn’t look quite right. We were across the room, laughing pretty hard because he kept sniffing them and asking the people around him, “Do you know what kind of cookies these are?”
After the gift exchange, Mark wandered the room, hoping to get someone to try one of the cookies. They ended up being sort of squishy and floppy, and he suspected they were made from Play-Doh. Our friend Kurt, who we’d let in on the secret, grabbed a cookie and took a big bite. He had hoped to convince Mark they were really delicious so Mark would follow suit, but it turned out they were, in fact, pretty horrible. Kurt immediately ran upstairs to the bathroom. Priceless.
By that time Laralee and I were laughing so hard we were crying, so we had to admit to Mark that they were mashed-potato cookies with black beans. He shrugged, took a small bite, and agreed they were awful.
Surprisingly, we ended up with a couple of gifts that weren’t half bad. Laralee has a new book that’s supposedly quite good, and I have a goofy monster hat. Hey, we’ve done worse.