Now that ChaChanzaa has come and gone, it feels really weird to come home and not head straight for the sweatshop—I mean craft room—to work on my gift. In the end, it wasn’t quite what I had hoped, though the disappointments fall under the “forgive us the things we have not done” rubric, rather than “yikes, what a pig’s ear I made of that.”
My gift was a set of six carefully programmed and burned audio CDs in a lovely zip-up metal case (available
here). I spent way too much time selecting the tracks and dithering about the running order, but you know how it is: You can take the DJ out of the studio, but …
So great is my pride in the CDs that I’ll make you a copy of one of them if you’d like. Just drop a line to ystblog[AT]hotmail[DOT]com telling me which one you’d like and where I should send it, and your wish is my command.
Here’s the selection. (I really don’t recommend the final CD—the only reason those songs were chosen is that the recipient is currently fixated on finding and buying a home, so all the tracks have the word “home” or “house” in the title.)
I received a fabulous and delicious chocolate cake topped with a vehicle tricked out to look like a miniature red version of our dear vanpool—and sitting in every seat was a little Mini-Me. Other gifts included a goofy hand-knitted cap, a recipe book, a selection of stress-reducing items, a set of coasters and other pleatherette sewn goodies, a clock, and a shower curtain decorated with photos from vanpool outings and printout of e-mails from our alias. You can see the huddled masses checking it out below.
The food was fabulous (it helps that this year’s host lives with a professional chef/food writer—so even basics like bread, cheese, ham, and pears were mind-blowingly good), the
Jell-O shots were effective, the champagne was delicious, and the company was vanpoolicious.
We concluded the evening with drunken dancing, preceded by the first public reading of S’s second vanpool sitcom screenplay. (The fantasy life of the van is just too complex to even begin to delineate here.) As was the case last year, I had the best lines and provided a
deus ex machina to punish our rival vanpool—a flock of trained pigeons this time around.
This morning I was astonishingly hangover-free. We even managed to make it to my work’s holiday party (another weird tradition I won’t even try to explain) by 11 a.m. (I could
maybe explain why we have our Christmas party in January, but justifying a 10 a.m. start is impossible.) At the party, I held several crying babies without ill effects. Yay Jell-O shots!
