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H A P P Y H O L I D AY S
The (white) elephant in the room
Office gift-giving can be fraught with hazards, but local employers have found ways to foster holiday cheer By Jocelyn Dong
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nonprofit. (For the record, Turner does own two cats.) Turner was one of the lucky ones. As many company employees have e x p e r ie nc e d , gift exchanges among coworkers don’t necessarily turn out merry and bright. Whether one is on the receiving or giving end, office gift-giving can be fraught with hazards. It’s especially so when participating in a “Secret Santa”
exchange, in which the gift giver is randomly assigned a recipient — whose tastes may not be obvious. An attempt at humor might be taken as an insult. A present that is a mite too personal can lead to misunderstandings. Trepidation over office etiquette during the holidays has spurred more than a million articles online offering advice, including Forbes. com’s “Office gift giving: Proceed with caution.” Some workplaces seek to find a happy medium — fostering camaraderie but avoiding awkwardness — by hosting a “white elephant” gift exchange. In that tradition, co-workers bring wrapped “white elephant” gifts, a term used to describe an unwanted and often outrageous item that isn’t supposed to please. The gifts are chosen one at a time, and the recipient is allowed to trade the gift for one already opened by someone else.
VERONICA WEBER
or the holidays one year, Diana Turner got a box of cat litter-box liners from a co-worker. And she loved it. Turner, group wellness director for the Palo Alto Family YMCA, explained that the Y’s leadership team used to engage in a little gift-giving tradition: After a holiday lunch at Pizz’a Chicago, everyone would choose a fellow team member’s name out of a hat, receive $5, and go across the street to shop at the Palo Alto Goodwill. There, they’d have to stealthily find and purchase just the right item, hiding it from the intended recipient, who was also trying to sneakily buy a gift for someone. “It was a fun and endearing tradition,” Turner said of the practice that also benefited another
The “white elephant” gift is described as an unwanted — and often outrageous — item that isn’t supposed to please.
Bob Cable, public relations manager for Stanford Lively Arts, calls his department’s annual white-elephant gift exchange “a nice morale builder for the
staff. It’s fun. It gets people in the mood for the holidays.” “One of the (gifts) I remember Continued on next page
Back to the Basic Board Game — Minus the Boredom and the Board. “Only tradition suggests something original…” – Max Gérard
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