Month: December 2010

This story first appeared in the December 23 issue of The Trussville Tribune…

There’s no situation more volatile and potentially dangerous to those involved than a roomful of women playing Dirty Santa. I should know. I play Dirty Santa on at least one occasion every Christmas season, and I always do my level best to help matters along – especially when it comes to getting my hands on something I really, really want.

For those of you unfamiliar with Dirty Santa, it’s a takeaway game played at countless Christmas parties every year. Each player brings a wrapped gift and places it in a pile with the other players’ gifts. Then everybody draws numbers to determine their turn.

The game begins when the person with the lowest number chooses a gift and opens it. Each subsequent player can either open a gift from the pile or steal a gift unwrapped by a previous player. If a gift is stolen, the person forced to give it up can either steal a gift from someone else or open a gift from the pile. Whenever the last gift in the pile is opened, the game ends.

Sounds simple, huh? But in reality, it’s usually anything but. In every game, there are always two or three gifts that several people really, really want and will go to any length to acquire. I’ve seen women play tug-of-war over everything from tree ornaments to holiday toilet lid covers, and I once even heard profanities exchanged by two players who had been the best of buddies only ten minutes before – and all for the sake of a matching scarf and glove set from your local discount store.

Friendship be hanged. Dirty Santa is serious stuff.

The funniest Dirty Santa incident I ever saw was when a fellow player finally managed to get her hands on a box of chocolate-covered cherries she’d been eyeballing since the beginning of the game. Bounty secured, she promptly ripped open the package and chowed down on the candy, rendering it instantly unattractive to the other players. Needless to say, nobody tried to steal it from her.

Dirty Santa has rules about stealing and giving up gifts, but try enforcing them with a woman who’s convinced that a pair of gold-trimmed votives are the finishing touch she needs for the decorations on her fireplace mantel. And try wresting that precious set of holiday cheese spreaders from the clutches of a woman hosting a Christmas party in her home three days hence. It ain’t gonna happen, sister.

Being a successful Dirty Santa player requires a fair measure of selfishness and a little bit of heartlessness. It takes quashing any tendencies toward generosity and ignoring anyone who begs you not to steal their gift – even if they say they want to pass it along to their dying grandmother who’s always wanted the very thing you’re striving to possess. Don’t fall for it. It’s a lie.

I can always count on an – ahem – interesting round of Dirty Santa at the annual Christmas party of a ladies’ class I’m affiliated with at church. You’d think a bunch of sweet church ladies would be pushovers in a game that encourages the use of sinful tactics for selfish gain. But that’s far from being the case. With so much practice over the years, they’ve gotten pretty good at being sinful. And along with them, so have I.

Used to be, I was timid about claiming anything I really wanted, allowing my natural inclination to let others have the best gifts prevail. But no more. If I see something I want, I go after it. And if I have to break somebody’s arm in the process, so be it. Consider yourself forewarned.

Come to think of it, maybe a better name for the game would be Violent Santa or Psychotic Santa or Nasty Lowdown Santa. I bet more men would participate if it were changed to one of those.

On the other hand, I can’t imagine guys getting excited enough over snowman doormats or silver metallic billfolds to stage a rumble, so we should probably just leave the name as is. We don’t, after all, want to end up playing Boring Santa.

This story appeared in the December 9 issue of The Trussville Tribune…

I used to be one of those intrepid shoppers who, without fail, hit the mall the day after Thanksgiving. But that was before the stores started opening at the crack of midnight, and navigating Black Friday sales became a hazardous contact sport. Sustaining a concussion for the sake of a few dollars off a rice steamer or a pair of fleece pajama pants isn’t my idea of a fun way to begin the holidays.

Neither am I one of those festive early bird types who spends the day after Thanksgiving steeped in Christmas decorations. I tried it once about eighteen or twenty years ago, but by the time December 25 rolled around, I was so sick of tinsel, holly and candle wax, I could have screamed.

It’s not that I don’t decorate for Christmas. I do. Eventually. But a couple of weeks of vacuuming tree droppings and dusting around three Nativity scenes, a miniature Christmas village and a collection of Santa figurines is plenty for me, thank you very much.

So this year on Black Friday, when I found myself casting about for something more productive to do than watching Hannah Montana reruns and gorging myself on leftover pumpkin squares and sweet potato soufflé, I decided to clean out kitchen cabinets.

This compulsion to weed out and rearrange didn’t come out of the blue. I’d been considering it for several weeks and the day off gave me some time to spare. It stemmed from a comment my husband made indicating the arrangement of the spices wasn’t conducive to his work style and, goodness knows, I want to do everything I can to encourage any work he cares to do in the kitchen.

You see Jimmie, after three decades and more of marriage, is learning how to cook. Motivated by a fear of starving to death while waiting for me to produce a meal, he’s well on his way to becoming the next Iron Chef.

I was once the only cook around here. But two years ago, I moved from self-employment at home to a job back out in the real world, so my days of throwing a roast into the oven or plugging up the crock pot in the middle of the afternoon ended. And Jimmie got hungry.

It’s not that I don’t cook at all anymore. Just not during the week. With our current work schedules, it makes more sense for Jimmie to cook. He gets off work an hour before I do and can have supper well underway before I even leave the office. Fortunately, he’s willing and, like I said, hungry enough to do it.

As to my Black Friday project, the cabinet where we keep the spices, cooking oils, and other such staples seemed to be Jimmie’s chief concern, so I started there. I could hardly believe some of the stuff I found, not to mention the age of it. A tin of whole mustard seed dated 1981. A tiny bottle of black walnut extract, its white label yellowed with age. Faded parsley flakes. Clumpy popcorn salt. I had no clue where some of those things came from or why we would have bought them in the first place.

But at least the prices were right. Faded stickers still clinging to some of the items indicated we once paid a whole lot less for groceries than we do now. I knew that already, of course, but actually seeing those substantially lower prices kind of made me ill. And I remember thinking they were exorbitant back then.

By the time I finished cleaning out that first cabinet – a bigger job than I’d expected – my enthusiasm had waned. So I tossed the things I’d weeded out into the trash and instead of starting on another cabinet, I started on the laundry. Whatever has accumulated in the other cabinets isn’t going anywhere, and I’ll get around to cleaning them out sooner or later.

Come to think of it, cleaning out a kitchen cabinet could be a new Black Friday tradition for me… But on second thought, maybe I’ll just pull out the Christmas decorations early from now on. It would probably be less trouble. Surely it would be more fun.