Traditionally, the day after Christmas was observed by giving gifts to the less fortunate. These days, it is a media-sponsored shopping day - where you stand in line to return the crappy gifts you got for Christmas.
If we get any crappy gifts, we save them for New Years Eve.
For the past twenty-odd years, ten of us - couples from the old neighborhood - have gotten together at the Clooneys for the annual rite of passage from old year to new year. We have drinks and dinner. George presides over the grading of our predictions from the past year. The winner gets a bottle of wine for a prize. Then he reads all of our new predictions for the coming year. Last year, when George predicted that oil woud drop below $75 a barrel. We all laughed.
A few of us predicted Obama's successful run, but nobody saw Sarah Palin coming. And no one really thought that we would be in a bad recession (or we definitely would have spent more money on frivolous things).
After predictions we have the White Elephant Yankee Swap. We are all charged to bring a wrapped, unwanted item that we got as a gift. Then, in fine Yankee Swap tradition, we draw numbers and choose from the pile of crappy gifts. The "gifts" range from bizarre noisy gadgets (e.g., a rotating santa claus that repeatedly plays some chinese melody) to the just plain ugly (a plastic fish that sings "On the dock of the bay," when you touch it's head).
It is a cut-throat game between competitive New York types (There are only 2 Boston area natives in the group), bringing out the worst in us, but it is kind of fun. We permit ourselves to be politically incorrect (laughing uproariously at gifts which reveal at the bad taste of less sophisticated gift givers) and we can be mean-spirited in a harmless way.
At the end, each of us ends-up with a crappy gift/stolen treasure. Clooney reminds us each year of the two rules: One, you must not dispose of the crappy gift until you are off his property; and two, you cannot save your crappy gift to bring again next year.
Then it is midnight; we all watch the ball in Times Square fall on TV. We drink some champagne, kiss all the members of the opposite sex and go home at 12:05. We are all in our sixties and cannot stay-up all night partying - like we did years ago.
The next day, we take the crappy gifts that we got from the white elephant swap to the dump. We call it "recycling;" more noble than re-gifting, don't you agree?
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