Two Pieces of Advice: The holiday gifts for which you didn’t ask.

I have a holiday combo pack of advice for you that can be sorted into two buckets: Employment Security and Life Lesson.

Intrigued? (I’ll settle for mildly interested.)

Employment Security

The First Bit of Advice for Which You Didn’t Ask:

DON’T perform an online search for “best white elephant gifts” while you’re at work.

It may end up being the last day that you do work. Permit me to elaborate.

Yesterday we received a very perky and festive email from our office manager, saying we would have our annual white elephant “gift grab” that is a yuletide party staple infusing holiday cheer.

I was pretty stoked about this year’s event, given that last year I waited too long to purchase an appropriate gift, precluding me from a) thinking; b) thinking creatively; and c) translating thinking into timely action, e.g., refraining from making a spur-of-the-moment purchase just hours before the party began.

This year I launched the white elephant gift search sequence immediately after receiving the aforementioned perky and festive email.

I sat right down – okay, you got me, I was already sitting – and I asked the entity with all of the answers – besides Siri, Alexa, my mother, and that new bank virtual assistant, Erica – that rhymes with Schmoogle, what the best white elephant gifts are for an office party.

Good grief, the results. As I sit here detailing my experience, I’m still sweating out what kind of online monitoring we have in place at work. The list my favorite search engine spat out is astoundingly inappropriate, even by my standards. (And, mind you, my latest humor book is titled with the phonetically spelled version of a naughty word.)

What popped right up are “funny white elephant gifts under 20.” Seems about right. Okay. Click.

That’s when I saw the list classified as “novelty” gifts. Yeah, right, if novelty means reflective only of humor about bodily parts and functions, acts of debauchery, and epigrams of non-clever profanity, then, yes. Quite novel. The novel-est.

The list was sponsored by some entity known as, “The Witty Yeti.” There was little to no wit, and it’s only by accident that I even know what a Yeti is, mainly because I’m such a dweeb that I looked it up one time when I was considering the purchase of a Yeti cooler. (You can see how heavily research plays into the use of my free time.)

Side bar: Have you seen how much those things are? Yeti coolers, not Yetis. I don’t think you can even buy that particular hominoid on eBay. Maybe Etsy. Those people are crafty.

Try putting that on your Christmas list. Again — the cooler, not the Abominable Snowman — and see how many other brands of coolers your family sees fit to gift you with instead.

Moving on to that second piece of advice. Let’s see if I can integrate another creature or three into the mix. So far, we’ve got an elephant and a Yeti.

Life Lesson

The Second Piece of Advice for Which You Didn’t Ask:

DON’T try to choose the perfect white elephant gift.

That is a string of oxymoronic words right there, “perfect white elephant,” for many reasons. The fact of the matter is when you think you’ve got the perfect item, think again. You absolutely do not. Why? Because “you” are not “them.”

Witness the year I decided to garner the non-existent award for best white elephant gift by jam-packing a large-as-an-elephant box with goodies I thought were stupendous.

And therein lies the problem: It was me who thought the gifts were stupendous. Guess who didn’t agree? Everyone else attending the party.

In point of fact, not only did no one do any stealing of the blasted thing, but the person who ended up with it acted as though it was even less than a consolation prize.

What was in this pop-goes-the-weasel-box? Wine, wineglasses, wine biscuits, a wine-themed tee-shirt, and a wine opener. You know what it got me? Whining. From the person who was stuck with the gift braying, “Well, I guess I’ll have to take this home.”

I was so stunned by my epic fail I felt as though I’d been charged by an elephant.

Because I don’t seem to take my own advice about embracing imperfection, every year I play a lead role in my own version of Groundhog Day. You’d think with a topic like elephant-themed gifts I’d remember.

Hum. Groundhogs, though. They don’t even really look like hogs, now do they? They look more like rodents, or squirrels. I wonder if there’s a relationship? I’m going to need to look it up.

Biography. After a diverse and rewarding career in television broadcasting, Diane wended her way toward both a teaching credential, and a Master of Arts in English, earning several publishing credits in the process, including her master’s thesis highlighting the work of author, Langston Hughes entitled, Changing the Exchange. Diane lives and works in northern California, where she’s often found performing in both scheduled and unscheduled productions in front of mostly attentive audiences. Her “sit-down standup” style of writing is featured in JUST BECAUSE I’M NOT EFFIN’ FAMOUS, DOESN’T MEAN I’M NOT EFFIN’ FUNNY, which is Diane’s fifth published book. Her other books, in no particular order include: Maternal Meanderings (Humor), Last Call (Humorous Mystery), KILL-TV (Humorous Mystery). Other publishing credits also include numerous essays that have appeared in a variety of periodicals, including MORE magazine, NPR’s This I Believe, The San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento magazine, Bigger Law Firm magazine, and the Sacramento Business Journal.