We had our cookie swap tonight. I wish I had thought to take a picture of the dining room table after everyone showed up, but I did not, so you will just have to imagine a large table literally covered in trays and boxes and platters of cookies. That large a group results in a whole lot of cookies.
We did the cookie exchange first, if only to try to clear some space on the table – everyone circling the table and plucking one box of bag of cookies from each pile until they were all distributed. Then everyone started helping themselves to the extra cookies, because what is a cookie party without actually getting to eat cookies during the process. As an aside, cookies are a perfectly acceptable dinner substitute, in case you were wondering.
Next was the gift swap. We do a variant of the White Elephant gift swap, but everyone brings something nice instead of silly. I think most of us have taken part in one of these games where the rules are not made clear, and so you end up with a mix of really nice gifts from people who are clueless, and a bunch of silly things from people who actually *know* how it is supposed to work, and then there is just confusion. I’ve taken part in quite a few of the silly gift version, and they are always a blast. This group goes for the nice version, if only because the theme is yarn, and knitters always would rather work with nice yarn.
Things always start off slow – the first few gifts are opened and people start to feel as if they might be able to keep the awesome thing they just unwrapped, but then the stealing began in earnest, and by the end I think nearly every gift had been stole at least once, which seems to me to be a sign of a successful swap game. Plus there is always a lot of laughter and good-natured bantering – trying to convince someone that they really *don’t* want to steal the thing you have, but instead steal someone else’s -and it was a lot of fun.
Oh, and as an aside, it turns out that if you let them sit overnight, gingerbread men made with baking powder taste the same as the ones made with baking soda, so maybe I didn’t need to panic as much yesterday after all. Oh well. I still needed the second batch, as it hadn’t made nearly enough, but at least now I know that I’m not going to be foisting sub par cookies off on the charity later this week. Phew.
‘Tis the season for Holidailies.