Wednesday, December 14, 2011

you may be a winner....

... and I am!

We had a contest at work. We decorated our office doors for Christmas. My office mate said, "Let's go all out, over the top, to the max, and win this thing!"

I said, "Yeah," with equal parts wan enthusiasm and fervent reservation. I reached for my wallet. "Here's $10, go for it!"

"Oh, I don't need your money, I have tons of decorations at home," she replied.

We're also doing Secret Santa at work. We pick names and buy modest gifts for each other. We reveal ourselves at the Christmas party. My Secret Santa gave me a small fuzzy Christmas stocking full of chocolate. Great! I ate the chocolate and taped the stocking to our door. Then my Secret Santa gave me a Santa pin. I poked it onto the sock. For extra festiveness I dug into a desk drawer and found a candy cane from last Christmas. I stuck it into the sock. The sock fell off the door and the candy cane broke. I taped it back together.

My office mate never got around to decorating our door. Hey, we're busy. We work all week and weekends too. We work from 6 or 7 am til dark. She just didn't get to it.

Voting Day arrived. The students had ballots and were instructed to wander the halls and judge our doors. There were two categories: Most Festive (creative and cheery!) and Charlie Brown (pitiful and pathetic, but hey, you tried).

On our door was the small stocking with the Santa pin and broken candy cane.

I joked that in our great American political tradition I would stand in my doorway passing out dollar bills and asking for their votes. Or I would stuff the ballot box. Or I would pass out candy and beg for votes. In the end I did nothing.

Other doors had lights, posters, family photos, grinning Santas, fiberoptic trees, and blinking snowflakes.

Oh yeah, we won the Charlie Brown award. Prize: a bag of microwave popcorn. Woo hoo!

Merry Christmas: Lucy, Linus, Charlie Brown, Shroeder, PigPen, and Snoopy :o)