Think first ... Will partying as Hermione be quite the attention grabber you envisaged? Photo: Supplied
EBAY is now flooded with unwanted Christmas gifts, I read the other day. Presents worth a king's ransom, rounded up and lumped together.
Ebay itself estimated that Australians were given nearly 20 million unwanted gifts in 2009, valued at $1.05 billion.
It's made me think of the things I'd like to return from the festive season. Not the gifts, those I can handle myself.
It's the festive season experiences I'd like to off-load -n Namely office Christmas parties of years past. Roughly the ones from 1998 to 2007. It was a tough decade. Some of my previous employers really believed that multiple Christmas parties should be held each year. It just extended the opportunities for us to embarrass ourselves.
The memory of my cadet reporter Christmas party/awards lunch is right up there.
It was tradition, I was told, for it to be a costume party with everybody dressing as ''somebody from the news''.
Well, Harry Potter was in the news at that time. You can see where this is going. I decided to dress as one of the cast members from the new movie (it was 2001).
It was a relatively simple costume - I just borrowed a graduation gown from a friend, added a wand and teased my hair.
Well, somewhere along the line the other cadets decided they weren't going to adhere to the dress code, and even the cadet instructor who set the theme didn't go through with it.
So, suspicious type that I was, I arrived with an alternative outfit in the car.
How could this go wrong, I wondered …?
I walked into the small restaurant where the awards lunch was being held and due to the size of the venue it was possible for everybody there to turn and stare at me at the same time, including a waiter who stopped mid-stride to stare.
I turned around to go back to the car, but the cadet instructor caught me before I could reach the door and insisted I continue to wear the costume as I was the only one who had come in the theme.
''Look - Genevieve came as Harry Potter'' she said. I looked across the table. Genevieve had done no such thing. She later showed me sheepishly a wig she was hiding under the table.
So that's how I ended up going through my first Christmas lunch dressed as Hermione.
About an hour later a straggler arrived dressed as Shane Warne before he lost the weight - she had a pillow shoved up her shirt.
That wasn't the end of the Christmas cheer either. After that there was the rather dubious office tradition of Kris Kringle.
I cheated at office Kris Kringle every single year.
I just kept throwing the names back in the hat, claiming I'd pulled my own name out by accident, until I got somebody I liked.
At my first job a few years earlier I was given the ugliest ornament a girl could ever wish for: a pair of faux-glass plastic swans on a small platter with a mirror propped up behind them. The trinket was so monumentally gaudy I could barely take my eyes off it. I sat it on the table at the office Christmas party luncheon and everybody seated near me stared at it in silent bewilderment.
I ended up keeping it, just as a trophy to show how tacky Kris Kringle gifts could truly be.
Much to my amusement my husband found it earlier this year and put it in pride of place in a display case.
It was so ugly, he reasoned, that it must have been really expensive, for me to have kept it.
Little did he know that there was always a dollar limit to how much we could spend on any particular round of Kris Kringles and that year the limit was $5 . Ebay's got nothing on Kris Kringle for unwanted gifts.
Photo albums proved extremely popular with office Kris Kringlers - I should know, I received about three in a row. I worked at a few offices where my helpful colleagues would stack on a few each Christmas - one for the department, one for the floor, one for the shorthand class students (thanks for the swans).
I got a picnic rug one year and a book about famous front pages from newspapers of the 20th century - those were my favourites. I gave out lollies pretty much every year.
After that were the formal office Christmas parties with booze. A lot of my colleagues indulged in the time-honoured tradition of trying to drink their annual salary in a night.
We all learned the hard lesson that you can never beat the bar tab that way.
Last year I found my own way to bring some Christmas fun into office life here at The Canberra Times. We don't do the Kris Kringle thing, but we do believe in sharing.
So, in that spirit, I brought in a 2kg gummy bear to share which I had been given for Christmas by my brother-in-law.
It sat in the tearoom for days, slowly getting smaller and smaller.
It turns out that sharing a gummy bear is hard, sharing it when it is 2kgs is even harder.
My brother-in-law was generous that year, he also bought me a few kilograms of caramel coated popcorn which I find fantastically addictive. For the sake of my health, that popcorn made an appearance in the tearoom too.
To top it off, my brother-in-law got me a Disney book, where he had paid to have my name added to its classic stories.
A month earlier he had asked me cryptically: if I was stuck on a desert island which two people would I like to be stuck with? I said Bear Grylls and Marion from MasterChef.
It all made sense on Christmas Day. He gave me a version of The Little Mermaid where I popped up as one of the mermaid's best friends.
Towards the end of the tale the villain - a giant octopus woman - is trying to kill the mermaid and the fishy heroine asks for my help.
It's inexplicable - Grylls could killed the enormous octopus for me and Marion could have cooked it.
Nonetheless, Ebay can't have it. It's grown on me, and besides, my swans need some company
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